Thursday 14 January 2016

Power plants, utilities ‘just hanging right off the internet’s tubes’

Utilities opening their infrastructure to the internet are creating an irresistible honeypot for criminals, says the US government’s Industrial Control Systems Cyber Emergency Response Team. .

In spite of often being billion-dollar operations with long-standing experience in their industrial control networks, critical infrastructure owners seem to think they can take advantage of the public ‘net for connectivity without a care for security.

While ICS-CERT‘s Marty Edwards, speaking to the S4 conference in Miami this week, didn’t call such operators idiots, he may as well have done. According to Reuters, he came close, saying: “I am very dismayed at the accessibility of some of these networks … they are just hanging right off the tubes.”

Edwards also said the number of attacks on such networks is increasing. With such poor security – and with the number of vulnerabilities listed at ICS-CERT running along at around 100 per year in 2014 and 2015, by The Register‘s quick perusal of it advisories – a successful compromise is inevitable. For the full article click here 



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