Is Your SCADA Vulnerable to a Cyber Attack? Call 1-800-USA-0DAY
"You can't change a password or your lights will go out!" yelled out a woman sitting in the audience of a workshop on how to secure a SCADA system. The woman identified herself as an engineer at a New York electric company.
"It would take us 5 years and $25 million to change a SCADA system," she said. Her comments were in response to a presentation delivered by Blake Cornell, an independent security researcher speaking at the third annual International Conference on Cyber Security here in New York City.
In recent years, we've seen an alarming number of breaches (and misreports) into critical infrastructure of industrial control systems, like electric and power grids, known simply as SCADA (Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition). 0 Comments, that enduring, infrastructure-targeting beast of a computer worm that crippled Iran's nuclear facilities in 2010, probably comes to mind first. Duqu, another worm believed to be written by the same authors, was programmed to steal industrial trade secrets. Together the worms have infected around 100,000 computers equipped with Siemens PLCs and Windows-based industrial software.
