US energy officials have found unexplained communication equipment inside some Chinese-made inverter devices.

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US energy officials have found unexplained communication equipment inside some Chinese-made inverter devices.

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Reuters reported the presence of undocumented and “rogue” communication devices in a number of Chinese-made solar inverters. These could potentially introduce unregulated and undocumented remote communication channels to the inverters, by which an actor could remotely bypass the cybersecurity firewalls that utility companies use to prevent direct communication back to China.

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  • stickly@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1·
    9 hours ago

    Unnamed “people” of some unnamed US spook organization

    People employed by a state actor to screen hardware (or closely related to screening) probably aren’t supposed to leak stuff like this. Nobody wants a potential adversary knowing what you do/do not know.

    rogue devices in an undisclosed number of Chinese solar inverters and batteries of not named brands

    Again, there’s no benefit to telling, especially when this could tie back to a leaker. How could they disclose a number? They deconstruct a sample selection, not every single one that’s installed. What would the public even do with brand information? Throw away the commercial utility grade inverters tied into their nonexistent home grid?

    which alerts Europe

    Spain just had a very public massive grid failure. Even if they don’t trust the US diplomatically, they could very easily take this info and verify it on their own devices.

    Every smart car on the road has a backdoor killswitch and GPS tracking, “just in case” it needs to be used against a private individual. You think a state actor supplying 30-40% of the global market (allies and adversaries alike) wouldn’t do the same thing?