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SCADA Systems a Target for Hackers?
superstick58 writes "As a system integrator, I am often providing control solutions that utilize sophisticated Ethernet networks and as they say in the biz 'link top floor to shop floor.' Forbes has an article about the security issues that exist in SCADA systems. When I look back at some of the systems I have put in which include direct I/O control over ethernet and distributed HMI monitoring, if I can get access from the internet, it would be easy to bring down power for a plant or at the very least make operators in the building very uncomfortable. How vulnerable are the manufacturing centers of the world?"
Yes, Frontline did a show about this a few years back.
I have worked in two industries: electric power (both hydro and nuclear) and communication satellites.
Technologies are similar to those used in consumer systems for a purely practical reason, there's cheap hardware available. But the safeguards built into any industrial system are totally unbelievable for anyone used to consumer systems, and possibly also for people in banking or other businesses.
I once counted the redundancy levels in a transformer protection system. There were 63 (yes, sixty three) different levels of protection for a humble transformer costing a mere $5 million. Imagine the protection around a $5 billion power plant.
Possible in theory, but in real life it's more likely that you would be able to drop a helicopter by ramping a car up a toll booth.
and at some point they're all connected to an outside connection.
Every customer my company has has a main site and a backup site. With redundancy in the main site as well (hot and standby servers, sans, etc). But most have remote clients that can connect to view data (corporate users) however maybe only 1 in 50 are actually tied in to the corporate domain. they're usually separate systems.
As far as the industry I've seen this in, oil & gas, as well as the water and waste water systems for a lot of medium size cities in north america. They also have a slew of international customers as well and the designs are pretty universal. How easy is it to break in and damage stuff? The software and protocols are all proprietary, and in fact most of the packets show up as "malformed" in wireshark. My guess is to really do damage they'd have to either be intimately familiar with the product (i.e. an ex-employee) or they'd have to find a way to take down the main site and backup site completely at once. These are always in geographically different locations.
Naw, it would be the same problem. Just imagine being stuck on a Linux distribution 10 years old. Who's going to support you there? You'll be immediately told to upgrade to the latest and greatest fix your problems, but then your software may not function anymore. What's worse, is that I am not aware of any popular open source programs for industrial control systems.
Well, unless it's some proprietary VPN protocol, you could just use a different client program that wasn't as strict about not letting you do things like bridge it. As long as you have the key, there's not a whole lot to stop you.
But I think what the GP was getting at was the risk of somebody having a workstation in the plant, somewhere, that's connected to both networks. If you have two NICs, and have the process-control network plugged into one, and the regular internet-accessible LAN plugged into the other, it's trivial to "accidentally" bridge them together.
Alternately, they could both just get plugged into one router or switch, and suddenly there's a path between them. A lot of weird things could happen if the two networks run alongside each other and there's not constant vigilance to keep people from doing something stupid.
In my office, we have separate subnets for different work areas. It works pretty well in terms of minimizing broadcast traffic and keeping people from accidentally printing to printers at the other end of the office, etc. But every few months they'll end up getting accidentally bridged by someone in a conference room plugging a wire from each subnet (they have separate jacks in the conference rooms, so that people can access their own area's stuff) into a switch. There's not really any malice involved -- people just see an Ethernet cable running from the wall towards a switch and notice it's unplugged, and they have a tendency to just jam it right in there.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
But depending on the size of the facility, a programmer might not be cost effective. Your average IT guy might not have the skill-set to right Linux kernal patches, and even if you're a small facility in a large corporation, you might not have the same software running your SCADA system as any other plant.
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