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hackers penetrating industrial control systems

The networks powering industrial control systems have been breached more than 125 times in the past decade, with one resulting in U.S. deaths, a control systems expert said on March 19. The managing partner of control systems security consultancy Applied Control Solutions, did not detail the breach that caused deaths during his testimony before a U.S. Senate committee, but he said he has been able to find evidence of more than 125 control systems breaches involving systems in nuclear power plants, hydroelectric plants, water utilities, the oil industry, and agribusiness. “The impacts have ranged from trivial to significant environmental damage to significant equipment damage to deaths,” he told the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee. “We have already had a cyber incident in the United States that has killed people.” At other times, the managing partner has talked about a June 1999 gasoline pipeline rupture near Bellingham, Washington. That rupture spilled more than 200,000 gallons of gasoline into two creeks, which ignited and killed three people. Investigators found several problems that contributed to the rupture, but the managing partner has identified a computer failure in the pipeline’s central control room as part of the problem. It could take the United States a long time to dig out from coordinated attacks on infrastructure using control systems, the managing partner told the Senators. Damaged equipment could take several weeks to replace, he said. A coordinated attack “could be devastating to the U.S. economy and security,” he said. “We are talking months to recover. We are not talking days.”” The industrial control system industry is years behind the IT industry in protecting cybersecurity, and some of the techniques used in IT security would damage control systems, the managing partner added. “If you penetration-test a legacy industrial control system, you will shut it down or kill it,” he said. “You will be your own hacker.”

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first published week of:   04/06/2009

Hard drive destruction 'crucial'

The only way to stop fraudsters stealing information from old computer hard drives is by destroying them completely, a study has found.

Which? Computing magazine recovered 22,000 “deleted” files from eight computers purchased on eBay. Criminals source old computers from internet auction sites or in rubbish tips, to find users’ valuable details. Freely available software can be used to recover files that users think they have permanently deleted.

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first published week of:   01/12/2009

High-tech hiring under investigation by the DOJ

The Obama Administration's intention to expand antitrust enforcement appears to be continuing apace, as a number of reports are describing the opening of a new investigation, one that targets a variety of high-tech companies in California's Bay Area. This time around, however, the target isn't anticompetitive behavior in the consumer market. Instead, the Department of Justice has apparently opened an investigation of whether the companies are colluding in the process of hiring, distorting the market for their employees by forging agreements not to recruit from other, similar ventures.

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first published week of:   06/01/2009

Hillsborough County, FL, Outsources Application Development

When a government agency needs a new business application, it can meet that requirement in several ways. It might buy an off-the-shelf product. An in-house IT professional might develop the software. Or the agency might outsource the job to a custom software service. Which of those options works best is a matter of debate.

There’s also a fourth option: the informal route. Consider the Surveying and Mapping section of the Real Estate Department in Hillsborough County, Fla. That organization boasts several employees who, although they aren’t trained programmers, know their way around Microsoft Access. Previously when one of them needed to track projects, staff activity or other administrative details, he or she would whip up an ad hoc Access application

. Those databases and related queries worked well for specific needs. But as managers raised increasingly more questions, even when all the required data was available, staff had a hard time retrieving answers.

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first published week of:   07/13/2009

How Science Fiction Writers Can Help, or Hurt, Homeland Security

A couple of years ago, the Department of Homeland Security hired a bunch of science fiction writers to come in for a day and think of ways terrorists could attack America. If our inability to prevent 9/11 marked a failure of imagination, as some said at the time, then who better than science fiction writers to inject a little imagination into counterterrorism planning?

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first published week of:   06/22/2009

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Volume 31

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