Hack out. How our start-up crashed the electricity grid

Sharelectron is your solution for energy trading from your home. We sell the solar power you don’t need, charge your car with that of your neighbors and store your spare heat during summer. Buy energy when prices are low, sell when prices are up. Without thinking. Our AI does that for you. Or that was our mission. Until today. Our management panel just got hacked and we did not foresee how this would influence the larger power grid. Be a good CISO or CIO and help me out making some tough decisions.

Our energy system has been turned into a smart grid, enlarging the attack service to the physical world. Grid operators may be secure, but the growing army of small devices on solar panels, charging stations and Home Energy Management Systems may be forming a botnet that can crash the grid. In this presentation, Chris van ‘t Hof takes you, together with his fictional company Sharelectron, along in a dark scenario, which may someday become reality if we don’t search, find and fix vulnerabilities in the whole energy system soon.