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Water Pump Destruction Not Due To SCADA Hack
knifeyspooney writes "According to the Springfield State Journal-Register, the city's recent public water system failure was not caused by malicious activity. One water district trustee spoke this gem: 'First, they tell us that it's the first instance of cyber hacking in the entire world, and everyone goes nuts. Now, all of a sudden, they tell us it's not.'"
say what? first instance of cyber hacking? are you suuuuuuuure about that?
simple. you tell that it is due to cyberhack. everyone goes nuts, endless number of articles spread throughout internet. then you admit that it wasnt. at this point it is now impossible to change misinformation. the misinformation spreads, public opinion is shaped. you can pass your $OPA act.
http://www.abc.net.au/science/articles/2011/07/11/3265013.htm
http://idle.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=10/07/14/1235220
Read radical news here
Good morning Mr. Mayor,
this is special agent Smith.
Yes, we'd like you to say the water pump malfunctioned and wasn't hacked.
No, no, I know about the truth, Mr. Mayor, but we don't want the public to be aware of the dangers they are in from exploding water towers and militarised telephone cables... or to encourage copycat hackers.
Yes, yes... just say it was normal wear and tear.
Oh, you're not going to comply?.. are you aware that we have an unauthorised GPS under your car and know what you do Tuesday nights? ... ahh I'm glad you see things our way.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
"How can two government agencies be so at odds at what’s going on here? Did the fusion center screw up, or is the fusion center being thrown under the bus?” commented Joe Weiss, the security expert who discovered the initial Fusion Center report and reported on it. “There’s a lot of black and white stuff in that report. Either there is or there isn’t a Russian IP address in there. It’s hard to miss that."
Yes, but we would prefer if government agencies didn't jump to outrageous conclusions before all the information is gathered.
As an actual control systems engineer who uses the Siemens Simatic range of PLC/HMI/Servo drives, it doesnt take a two year old who knows how torrents works to download the WinCC flex HMI programming software, throw together a few screens with some built in clipart of pumps and generators and claim he has hacked a city's water supply... or uranium plant, or Area 51 air con system..
The book is called @Large.
http://books.simonandschuster.com/At-Large/David-H-Freedman/9780684835587 Cuckoo's Egg might be the classic popular text from that era.
http://www.amazon.com/Cuckoos-Egg-Tracking-Computer-Espionage/dp/0743411463
Their they're doing there hair.
Well stuxnet affected Programmable logic controllers that affected centrifuges refining nuclear material. I was at a conference recently and half the talks were about stuxnet, duqu and PLCs, the show was not energy or utility industry related, but basically anything with a PLC is vulnerable to this sort of attack.
There were a lot of folks in industry talking about how uncertain they were about how tight their air-gaps were. Stuxnet got past air-gaps anyway, but at least a lot of the industrial controls folks are talking about it now. It would have been nice if someone listened when US-CERT reported researchers were able to remotely burn out an electrical generator in 2005.