07/09/2026
Solar farms and EV chargers all rely on inverters to feed power into the grid — and those inverters are a growing cyberattack surface. Researchers at the Grainger College of Engineering's Information Trust Institute are part of a $4.2M DOE-funded project (led by Georgia Tech) to find and fix these vulnerabilities before attackers do. Their work: testing real exploits against physical equipment in ITI's cyber-physical testbed, then feeding what they learn into AI-assisted attack-graph modeling. As David Emmerich puts it, "If the power goes out, that's not just a utility problem, that's a you and me problem too."
Read how Illinois is helping secure the grid's edge:
Securing the Grid's Edge: Grainger's role in protecting distributed energy resources
