Security News > 2020 > August > IoT botnets: Smart homes ripe for a new type of cyberattack
The burgeoning smart home device market has given rise to digital intrusion and potential energy market manipulation on a massive scale.
By 2025, it's been estimated that there will be 481 million smart homes worldwide, according to a Statista's 2020 Digital Market Outlook.
"The similar analogy would be, you're participating in a stock market and you know what is going to happen in the next day because you have some sort of control and manipulation over the next day's and next week's markets," Shekari said.
"The attacker can use the EV batteries, which form a small portion of the available vulnerable high-wattage devices, to charge [or] discharge them from [or] to the market just to slightly increase and decrease the load of the system. Such small energy manipulations, such as 1% of the system load, can significantly affect the energy market prices and the financial gain [or] loss of its players." Shekari said.
To reduce the risk associated with this type of attack, Shekari suggested releasing processed data instead of raw market data and sharing data with the marketplace rather than making this information readily available to the public.