SCADA Honeypots Lure Industrial Hackers Into the Open

Just 18 hours after security researcher Kyle Wilhoit connected two dummy industrial control systems and one real one to the Internet, someone began attacking one of them, and things soon got worse. Over the course of the experiment, conducted during December 2012, a series of sophisticated attacks were mounted on the “honeypots,” which Wilhoit set up to find out how often malicious hackers target industrial infrastructure.

Wilhoit’s findings provide some of the best evidence yet that people are actively looking for and attempting to take unauthorized control of the type of industrial systems that are used to control everything from energy plants to office HVAC systems. Recent years have seen U.S. politicians speak of and researchers demonstrate the vulnerability of such systems, and thousands are known to be connected to the Internet with weak or nonexistent controls against unauthorized access.