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Comment by tgv | Hacker News Reader

It's like the meter man visiting your house, but now they no longer have to enter. Isn't it wonderful? If I lived in the US, I'd immediately try to hack up a small Arduino project to read out my neighbours' energy usage.

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I do this with a cheap (~$20) USB RTL-SDR – no Arduino or custom electronics necessary. Of course, I only use it to monitor my own energy usage (electricity and gas) using rtlamr[1] and a script that periodically sends the data to InfluxDB, then displayed using Grafana.

The result is a smart home energy monitor that doesn't require any clamps near the electrical panel, and it exactly matches the usage for which I'll be billed.

[1] https://github.com/bemasher/rtlamr

Crazy how easy that is. I bet within a year we hear about criminals using something like this to know when people leave their house for extended periods.

That repo is over 7 years old. It’s exploitable, but I’m pretty convinced that this info has been out for many years.

https://hackaday.com/2014/02/25/using-sdr-to-read-your-smart...

Can confirm, I was playing with this in my neighborhood years ago. I'm pretty sure it was the gas meters I was seeing.

And then promptly get bored. It's in the same category as running wifi deauth attacks - fun for 5 minutes.

Yep, as much as I love them Hak5 somehow still maintains a "fan base" for this kind of petty "hacking".

Still, hat's off to Darren and Shannon!

I think most of the modern gear uses ZigBee’s publicly document smart energy protocols. It’s encrypted.

I live in a townhouse and our meters are outside next to where we park our cars. I can read my neighbors energy usage whenever I want.

One uses more electricity than I do and the other less.

I've never had a meter reader enter any house I've lived in, which would be somewhere around 15 different units. All gas/electrical/water meters are on the outside of the house/apartment whether they were smart meters or the traditional ones. Anyone can walk up to them and read them. The digital or analog dial readout is not locked/secured/obscured in any way.

Use SDR networks to do it from afar.

http://www.websdr.org/

Or better still, kill your own meter and have something ping out a reading thats 100 times less expensive.

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