More people in South Africa are looking to use battery and solar inverters in their homes and businesses due to the increase in loadshedding of late.
Unfortunately this triggers the opportunities for cyber criminals to take advantage of this situation in order to hack into individuals’ WiFi networks that the modern inverters are using for their remote management by the installers and solar services companies. Is it a concern that we can trust that our efforts to avoid power outages in this manner will not end up with a backfire? According to the recent article at PV Magazine by the author Emiliano Bellini, a Dutch agency is investigating the cybersecurity of PV inverters after a hack took place in Netherlands whereby the hacker gained access to PV systems operated via a monitoring tool from China’s Solarman. The hacker was apparently able to view personal data of customers and delete existing customers and was also able to tweak and upload firmware to the inverter.