Security News > 2022 > January > What is opening EV charging stations to cyberattacks?

As the number of electric cars on the road grows, so does the need for their electric vehicle charging stations and the internet-based managing systems within those stations.

The systems built into electric cars perform critical duties over the internet, including remote monitoring and customer billing, as do a growing number of internet-enabled EV charging stations.

Bou-Harb and his fellow researchers wanted to explore the real-life implications of cyberattacks against EV charging systems and how to utilize cybersecurity countermeasures to mitigate them.

"Electrical vehicles are the norm nowadays. However, their management stations are susceptible to security exploitations," said Bou-Harb, who is an associate professor in the Carlos Alvarez College of Business' Department of Information Systems and Cyber Security.

"We devised a system lookup and collection approach to identify a large number of electrical vehicle charging systems, then leveraged reverse engineering and white-/black-box web application penetration testing techniques to perform a thorough vulnerability analysis," Bou-Harb said.

To prevent a mass attack on the power grid, the researchers are recommending that the developers patch existing vulnerabilities but also incorporate initial security measures during the manufacturing of the charging stations.

News URL

https://www.helpnetsecurity.com/2022/01/21/ev-charging-stations-cyberattacks/