At about 7 am last Sunday, the power went out simultaneously in five countries — all of Argentina, most of Uruguay and parts of Paraguay, Chile and Brazil. About 50 million people were affected as homes, businesses and cities were crippled for about 12 hours. One power company blamed another, one country blamed another, but eventually a consensus emerged: the system had been brought down by a cyber attack.

It remains to be seen whether or not this explanation was a way of deflecting attention from the culpability of executives and governors who have presided over the long deterioration of electric grids everywhere. But it is true — and a great irony — that much of what utilities have spent in recent years to upgrade the grid has made it far more vulnerable to bad actors.

Today, it’s all about the “smart” grid (almost all the catch phrases of modern industrialism are oxymorons) which means a grid connected to the Internet of Things, a.k.a. the Internet of Shit (not my word, by the way, it’s a website, a Reddit sub and a Twitter hashtag). The Internet of Things has been devised not by people trying to improve the Internet or the grid, but by people trying to sell you more crap by calling it “smart:” thermostats, air conditioners, doorbells, refrigerators, light bulbs, and on and on. (I have just watched a three minute YouTube tutorial on how to reset a smart light bulb that has been stricken dumb. I would have used a .22 pistol. 30 seconds max.)

The Things are called Smart because you can access them via the Internet, with your “smart” phone, to turn them up or down or off or on. Or to see who is cavorting with the babysitter while your house burns down. But these “smart” devices turn out to be a really dumb idea because each and every one of them offers a portal to the Internet that also runs things like the electric grid, and nuclear power stations. Hackers can get into the Internet via your thermostat and bring down the national grid. They have done it, and they are doing it.

The New York Times reported last week that the United States is making frequent cyber incursions into the Russian electric grid. (President Trump didn’t deny it, but said it was “treasonous” to report it.) Since 2011, a group of nation-sponsored hackers known as “Dragonfly” has been attacking energy systems in the United States and Europe, and has recently gained access to and some control over the operating systems of electric utilities. Their intentions are not benign. Hackers took down much of Ukraine’s electric grid in 2015, shutting down power to a quarter million people in what was taken as a warning shot, because it could have been much worse.

Much of the money spent on electric grids in the last decade — Bloomberg Business puts it at $30 billion dollars a year worldwide — has been for installing so-called “smart” electric meters that can be controlled via the Internet to manage demand. One serious estimate is that half a billion of them have been installed around the world. In conjunction with the wildly proliferating Internet of Sh…I mean Things…these meters offer hackers a multitude of back doors into their promised land. By placing malware on myriad small appliances, for example, they can easily mount a so-called “denial of service” attack that floods a website with so many simultaneous demands for page views that real people can’t log in. Hostile hackers in 2010 crippled Iran’s entire nuclear enrichment program — they used an infected USB drive for access, but still.

So when the hucksters come by with their smart shit that plugs into both the grid and the Internet, and when the utility hucksters come by with their smart meter that they would rather buy than replace their half-century-old wires and transformers, be aware that what they are really selling you is an opportunity to freeze (or broil) in the dark sooner, rather than a little later. This is turning into a clusterhack.

“Power” by enamic5 is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0