Europe’s huge solar infrastructure at critical threat from Chinese hackers: Report

New Delhi, July 11 A new report has warned that by exploiting hardware backdoors or pushing malicious updates simultaneously to millions of inverters, key components of the massive solar infrastructure, Beijing “theoretically commands the ability to cause massive blackouts all around Europe”. The inverter is the “electronic brain” that converts solar energy into usable electricity for the wider network. Since these modern devices require constant software updates, maintenance and data monitoring, they are permanently connected to the internet, said the report in Brussels Signal. “Today, approximately 80 per cent of Europe’s new solar installations rely entirely on Chinese-made inverters, with…