Posts

Motivation One day, my IQ Gateway stopped working. The IQ Gateway is a device from Enphase designed to collect solar panel production data, and optionally consumption data, and then report it to the cloud. It also provides per-panel data from each microinverter. Since I was busy, I didn’t get to check on it immediately. When I eventually took a look, I noticed the device on the network, but the local API was non-functional. I also noticed that the device showed as offline in the mobile app. When I looked at the device, I saw all four lights flashing red. ...

1. How It Began It all began when my university was attacked. I was still a student at UMBC in my final semester when I received a suspicious email over the weekend. Initial phishing email and redirect chain I immediately became suspicious, because while the email urged me to click a link regarding my university ID, there were some grammatical errors. Additionally, I saw the urgency implied by the email and that made me even more suspicious. At this point I realized it was a phishing scam. The email was sent from an email address within UMBC, but it was not the appropriate one for that kind of message. ...