SUN:DOWN

A Dark Side to Power Grids

Smarter. Greener. But still vulnerable.

Forescout Research – Vedere Labs latest ground-breaking research discovers new vulnerabilities that make dangerous attacks on the power grid and smart-home devices possible. Three solar power vendors – Sungrow, SMA, and Growatt – have nearly 50 flaws, collectively, that could lead to grid disruption and potential blackouts.

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46

new vulnerabilities found

93

known vulnerabilities cataloged

80%

high/critical severity known vulnerabilitiess

32%

CVSS score 9.8 – 10

Don’t Let the SUN:DOWN Go Down for You

Vedere Labs’ head of research, Daniel dos Santos, explains the findings and mitigation strategies in detail. Utilities, manufacturers, and consumers will learn how to improve system security and ensure grid reliability.

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How Solar Power Systems Work

There are several types of solar power systems, plus inverters.

Residential

with 6 to 20 solar panels that power a single house (5-15 kW)

Commercial

can generate around 100 kW or more to power anything from a small gas station to a large manufacturing plant

Industrial or Utility‑Scale

systems with large arrays have hundreds or thousands of panels in a ground-mounted solar farm or solar park (at least 1MW)

Inverters

convert DC power from solar panels to AC power and are connected to the grid, the vendor’s cloud, and sometimes other IoT devices

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Where the Risk Is Today

Canada and Australia have the most observed commercial installations of solar power in Forescout’s Device Cloud, followed by the US, Norway, and the UK.

Solar Devices by Sector

We identified close to 1,700 solar power devices in commercial installations in our Device Cloud. Most of those devices are in the government, manufacturing, and education sectors — followed by financial services, services, and healthcare.

Attack Scenarios

The flaws we discovered could be used in attacks to cause power grid instability. Attackers could gain access to vulnerable inverters and tamper with their configurations.
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See the Research, Share the Presentation

Vedere Labs shares an overview of the research in a presentation format for you and your security team to use and share. See the vendors’ vulnerabilities, the insecurity of inverters, key takeaways, and our recommendations for mitigating risk.

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Strategic Recommendations:
How Forescout can Help

  • Risk and exposure management. Identify, quantify and prioritize cybersecurity risk. Start by discovering and assessing every connected asset to gain real-time awareness of your attack surface.
  • Network security. Continuously monitor all connected assets to govern network access, using real-time traffic visibility to manage segmentation and dynamic control policies to mitigate and remediate risk.
  • Threat detection and response. Detect, investigate and respond to true threats and incidents using threat detection and response capabilities to collect telemetry and logs, correlate attack signals, generate high-fidelity detections and enable automated responses.
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