SCADA? Supervisory Control And Data Acquisition Sounds boring?
No it is not -- this is the backbone of all large industrial process control and these systems were never designed with security in mind. The software predates then internet and was never intended to be networked to anything but the machines in a factory and operator consoles.
When the internet came into being, people started connecting them to the net so the home office in Buffalo could see how extruder #124C was performing. Unfortunately, these machines then became exposed to every hacker out there and problems started manifesting.
I have written about this before -- here is a collection of posts: SCADA in the news again
Fast forward twenty years and we are still having serious problems. From Yahoo/Reuters:
U.S. utility's control system was hacked, says Homeland Security
A sophisticated hacking group recently attacked a U.S. public utility and compromised its control system network, but there was no evidence that the utility's operations were affected, according to the Department of Homeland Security.
DHS did not identify the utility in a report that was issued this week by the agency's Industrial Control Systems Cyber Emergency Response Team, or ICS-CERT.
"While unauthorized access was identified, ICS-CERT was able to work with the affected entity to put in place mitigation strategies and ensure the security of their control systems before there was any impact to operations," a DHS official told Reuters on Tuesday.
A clueless idiot:
"Internet facing devices have become a serious concern over the past few years," the agency said in the report.
BZZZZTTT!!! Make that twenty years. More:
Last year ICS-CERT responded to 256 cyber incident reports, more than half of them in the energy sector. While that is nearly double the agency's 2012 case load, there was not a single incident that caused a major disruption.
They are probing. They are seeing how fast we detect them and patch the holes. They are waiting for a time when the attack will be launched and the USA power grid could potentially be taken down for weeks. This is asymmetric warfare and the US Government is a senile blind fool -- Kerry for Sec. State? Really?
