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| Terror Networks |
| Cyber attacks on "SCADA" systems |
| 2003-08-15 |
| Interesting article on vulnerabilities of SCADA (Supervisory Control And Data Acquisition) Systems that could be used to cause future power failures, among other things. Here’s one real-life example snipped from the complete article: In Queensland, Australia, on April 23, 2000, police stopped a car on the road to Deception Bay and found a stolen computer and radio transmitter inside. Using commercially available technology, Vitek Boden, 48, had turned his vehicle into a pirate command center for sewage treatment along Australia’s Sunshine Coast. Boden’s arrest solved a mystery that had troubled the Maroochy Shire wastewater system for two months. Somehow the system was leaking hundreds of thousands of gallons of putrid sludge into parks, rivers and the manicured grounds of a Hyatt Regency hotel. Janelle Bryant of the Australian Environmental Protection Agency said "marine life died, the creek water turned black and the stench was unbearable for residents." Until Boden’s capture -- during his 46th successful intrusion -- the utility’s managers did not know why. Specialists in cyber-terrorism have studied Boden’s case because it is the only one known in which someone used a digital control system deliberately to cause harm. Details of Boden’s intrusion, not disclosed before, show how easily Boden broke in -- and how restrained he was with his power. Boden had quit his job at Hunter Watertech, the supplier of Maroochy Shire’s remote control and telemetry equipment. Evidence at his trial suggested that he was angling for a consulting contract to solve the problems he had caused. To sabotage the system, he set the software on his laptop to identify itself as "pumping station 4," then suppressed all alarms. Paul Chisholm, Hunter Watertech’s chief executive, said in an interview last week that Boden "was the central control system" during his intrusions, with unlimited command of 300 SCADA nodes governing sewage and drinking water alike. "He could have done anything he liked to the fresh water," Chisholm said. Like thousands of utilities around the world, Maroochy Shire allowed technicians operating remotely to manipulate its digital controls. Boden learned how to use those controls as an insider, but the software he used conforms to international standards and the manuals are available on the Web. He faced virtually no obstacles to breaking in. Nearly identical systems run oil and gas utilities and many manufacturing plants. But their most dangerous use is in the generation, transmission and distribution of electrical power, because electricity has no substitute and every other key infrastructure depends on it. |
| Posted by:Dar |
| #3 Mr. Boden is a fool. He could have had a job with my employer. I install and maintain power plant distributed control systems in the US. Our system is the #1 system in the world. We are installing them like crazy in plants in China (and hopefully Iraq soon.) We are desperate for engineers. We have never been able to fill more than 3/4 of our positions even at the height of the recession. All systems are vulnerable to inside jobs no matter the security. Soon, there will be DCS experienced insiders from most nations. Nuke plants in the US do not use digital controls for safety system control, they do use them here and there for data acquisition and non-safety related control. It is a long story why not. We do zero business with nukes. Thank Allah. Nuke plants are the bedrock also of a restart of an entire grid outage because they all have mojo big diesels generators with beaucoup diesel fuel on hand. Most coal and gas turbine sites have no provision for cold start. Most plants keep their distributed control systems on isolated networks which means inside jobs only. Hacking an unisolated system is always possible. Understanding what to do at the point is another story. Simply trashing of the system hard drives is not the end of the world. Real lasting damage takes understanding of myriad plant processes and the grid itself. (My definition of real damage is: the entire grid comes down and stays down for a long period.) The current grid outage doesn't amount to real damage in my book. Unless UBL has boiler tuners or engineers specifically experienced at "reading" the control process on his payroll with lots of time and extreme hacking skills on multiple operating systems, a significant cyber-jihadi grid attack is not a significant threat....yet. Now the Chinese government on the other hand has plenty of tuners and hackers... Anyway, in the end pooh on the lawn or a power plant attack is not the name of the game, a grid attack is. |
| Posted by: hammerhead 2003-8-15 4:49:07 PM |
| #2 Some SCADA engineers worry about it, also. Random targets have a fairly high probability of being hardened. The problem is that there are enough targets that aren't hardened to take down the grid. |
| Posted by: Dishman 2003-8-15 4:42:47 PM |
| #1 Argh--Hat tip: InstaPundit. I'm shameless! |
| Posted by: Dar 2003-8-15 1:44:03 PM |