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SCADA Hacker: Water District Used 3-Character Password
Trailrunner7 writes "In an e-mail interview with Threatpost, a hacker who compromised software used to manage water infrastructure for South Houston, Texas, said the district had HMI (human machine interface) software used to manage water and sewage infrastructure accessible to the Internet and used a password that was just three characters long. The hacker, using the handle 'pr0f' took credit for a remote compromise of supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) systems. Communicating from an e-mail address tied to a Romanian domain, the hacker told Threatpost that he discovered the vulnerable system using a scanner that looks for the online fingerprints of SCADA systems. 'This was barely a hack. A child who knows how the HMI that comes with Simatic works could have accomplished this,' he wrote in an e-mail."
The weak point is always going to be the human being. Pile on as much security as you want and people are going to find ways to disable it and make themselves vulnerable. Thousands of jobs in the tech support industry depend on it.
Is a FRACKING SCADA system on the internet?
The Plant manager needs to be fired on the spot. there is ZERO need to have a full connection from a SCADA system to any internet accessable networks.
An airgap for data is standard operating proceedure for these things. Hell even crap SCADA software like "wonderware" supports a unidirectional ethernet cable and UDB broadcasting of the data stream so that you can airgap it from the administrative computers doing data collection.
Note: if you don't know what a "unidirectional ethernet cable" is, think standard Cat 5 with the TX wires clipped off on one end http://www.stearns.org/doc/one-way-ethernet-cable.html and YES they do work PC to PC with the right settings or by using a switch where you can force a port on without negotiation.
No hacker on this planet can crack a system that is at the other end of this type of cable, unless he has physical access.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
H2o. Need at least one uppercase, one lower case and one non-letter.
The most telling thing, for me, was this section of the linked article:
So...in the instance of a single shoe bomber, stopped by his own stupidity and the efforts of other airline passengers, TSA (a section of DHS) responds by calling it a systemic risk to air travel, and we must all take off our shoes. In the instance of a plot to use liquid explosives, which probably wouldn't have worked and was stopped in the planning stages, TSA responds by calling it a systemic risk and we must all limit ourselves to 3oz bottles of liquids that fit in a quart size bag. In the instance of a single underwear bomber, stopped by his own stupidity, TSA responds by calling it a systemic risk to air travel, and we must all be subject to X-ray/millimeter wave scanners and/or the big Grope.
In the instance of SCADA hacking, which could conceivably harm our infrastructure on a significant and systemic level from afar, with little/no risk of the perpetrators being caught, DHS responds by saying, "No big deal."
There's something very...wrong here.