Plugged In and Exposed: The Growing Cybersecurity Threat to EV Charging Infrastructure
Brief
By Adrian Cheek, Senior Cybercrime Researcher
Publicly exposed EV charging infrastructure remains an unresolved cybersecurity problem. Security practitioner Ken Munro has spent years taking apart the machines that charge electric cars. When asked what actually kept him up at night, he did not point to any one broken device. He pointed at all of them at once. A single compromised charger is a nuisance.
Thousands of them switching on and off in unison, on the same scheduled overnight cycle, is a lever against the power grid itself.
That scenario has lived in security researchers’ warnings for the better part of a decade, but it depends on a precondition that is easy to state and rarely measured: that the chargers are reachable, and that reaching them is not hard.