Know What's Happening in Business

Weak Security Means Attackers Could Disable All of a City's Public EV Chargers

Researchers at Black Hat Asia demonstrated that rented IoT infrastructure—such as public EV chargers and shared e‑bikes—often sacrifices security for convenience. Hetian Shi of Tsinghua University uncovered shared authentication keys, exposed debug ports, and backend services that fail to verify users. Using his IDScope tool, he disabled a Shanghai charging station in seconds and showed how phantom clients can obtain free rides. The findings span Chinese and European providers, suggesting a global risk of large‑scale denial‑of‑service attacks on city‑wide charging networks.