Slashdot Mirror
Hackers Modify Water Treatment Parameters By Accident (softpedia.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Verizon's RISK security team has revealed details on a data breach they investigated where some hackers (previously tied to hacktivism campaigns) breached a payments application from an unnamed water treatment and supply company [PDF, page 38], and also escalated their access to reach SCADA equipment responsible for the water treatment process. The hackers modified water treatment chemical levels four different times. The cause of this intrusion seems to be bad network design, since all equipment was interconnected with each other in a star network design, and the payments app contained an INI file with the administrative password for the central router, from where the hackers reached the water treatment SCADA equipment. Of course, the hackers had no clue what they were modifying. Nobody got poisoned or sick in the end.
If somebody had have died or gotten sick, the hacking party would be the ones to get in shit, not the asshat that put the admin password in a text file...
I got rather sick when I read that the admin password was in the ini file.
Problem is, this is a lot more "just the beginning" than "in the end".
How many such systems do you suppose have been penetrated by folks who do know what they're doing, and are just sitting on their access until the next political party convention, or major sporting event, or...?
I've rarely seen a classic "control system" (HVAC, security, wet and dry lab systems, anything with modems and 9600kbps transmission, ANSI screens, etc) be configured in anything BUT 1980's architecture. These industrial control systems are so old and embedded no one has the money or incentive to remove them and install modern tech. And most of them are archaic, and so incredibly vulnerable it can make a person lose sleep. Think yet another "tip of the iceberg"moment. Think water control, sewage control, electrical control, alarms control, traffic light control. NOT ALL, but the majority are hopelessly insecure and controlled by people who use FAX machines. Anything installed before 2000 or so (the majority) are childlike in design and harbor absolutely no notion of security.
You know, every time I have encountered anything this moronic I've raised bloody hell over it.
Why the hell would a fscking payment app need the administrative password for the damned router, and what idiot allowed this on their network. On at least three occasions I've said "no way in hell I'm going to put a plaintext password into an INI file, and if you want me to do it you're going to have to send me an email and CC a lot of other people demanding it". (Reading TFA, it wasn't the actual payment app, but they got it off a web server they compromised which had it in an INI file, so bad job in the summary).
I swear, security is often either non-existent or written by idiots.
And that's before you even get to the epic stupidity of having your SCADA stuff to your normal network. I've been in places that had SCADA stuff, and NOTHING was on that network which wasn't fully vetted.
This whole article reads like "what happens when unqualified people run critical systems" -- right down to the fact that they also had access to "2.5 million customer and financial records".
I'd like to say I'm astonished, but that would imply that I keep being surprised at just how bad companies suck at fairly basic security.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Equipment of this sort should be air gapped from the wild wild west of the internet. Frankly anything that is safety related (hospital equipment, elevators, and even HVAC systems) should be unreachable without badging into a building. While there are still ways to propagate things in via USB stick, it would keep clowns from pulling this kind of stuff.
There's only one security that counts with a SCADA system: air gap. Plant-controlling systems must not talk to any other network. ...and then a year or two later you find them trying to quietly slip two network cards into the same machine so they don't have to change chairs to go from corporate-network-with-Internet-access to SCADA.
I recently retired from a much-larger utility and we did struggle with the human factor. The plant guys heard all the lectures from their design consultants that put in the system and the IT people who checked the design over. They understand that they must not interconnect.
Emotionally, it's hard to believe anybody would *want* to break in; it's not like there's money to be made. Hollywood-movie scenarios where "hackers take over" are ludicrous; every device in the plant has an "On/Off/Auto" switch where only "Auto" leaves SCADA in control at all; the most junior operator could run around the plant hitting those switches in five minutes, restoring manual control. (Then we'd have to bring in a dozen folks with cell phones to run the plant manually; no sweat).
And as I posted above, it's not like you can kill anybody with a water treatment plant: the worst water you could put out would either be untreated (please boil water) or absolute max chlorine the system could insert (still less than a swimming pool).
It's going to be the same as "safety"; you can pound safety lectures into people's heads all day, but it seems to take a generation or two for the message to really sink in; hard hats and visibility vests were strenuously avoided as well. We're just going to have to make it a standard, like safety standards: firing for disobedience, regardless of whether anything went wrong.
If somebody had have died or gotten sick, the hacking party would be the ones to get in shit, not the asshat that put the admin password in a text file...
The rules are no different than if you and your gang of adolescent thrill seekers climbed over the fence or found an unlocked gate and began flipping exposed switches or opening valves just for the hell of it.
4) IT management rarely has any understanding of risks associated with IT designs/constraints. Even when explained to them.
There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure