BATON ROUGE - A team made up of faculty and researchers from both LSU and Southern has received a grant to increase security of EV infrastructure. 

LSU's cybersecurity expert Elias Bou-Harb said he and his co-authors for a research paper discovered almost 30,000 electric vehicle charging stations were online and could be accessed remotely, potentially affected their software or hardware. 

Bou-Harb teamed up with Sudhir Trivedi, the chair of computer science at Southern University, to try and learn more about and address this problem. 

Together, the two applied for a $1.2 million grant through the National Science Foundation to extend their research and make cybersecurity education available for minority-serving institutions around the country. 

"Together, we will go deep into the security of these electric vehicle charging management stations from a digital forensics perspective and network security perspective,” Bou-Harb said. “I think we all remember what happened with CrowdStrike last month. Our project will help prevent also those accidental bugs that could have truly disastrous consequences.”