Control System Security Threats, Security / Reliability Incidents, Useful Industrial Cyber Security Tips
As the holidays approach I thought I should examine a key burning question – what makes a good gift for a controls engineer? Being an engineer myself, and a recent recipient of the latest Kindle 3G, I will examine the merits and drawbacks of the Kindle as a gift.
Techy coolness factor
The Stuxnet story is getting stranger by the minute. First Iran’s President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, gave a press conference earlier today where he admitted that Stuxnet had hit Iran’s uranium enrichment centrifuges.
Over the past two weeks, there has been considerable progress in determining exactly what industrial process Stuxnet’s creators were trying to destroy. This news is not good for the industrial control system and SCADA communities.
First the Symantec team announced that one of Stuxnet’s payloads was designed to change the output frequencies of specific Variable Frequency Drives (VFDs) and thus the speed of the motors connected to them, essentially sabotaging the industrial process.
Over the years I have been asked by a number of control engineers, “Our IT dept says we have VLANs, so why do I need a firewall?”
Back in the mid-90s, I was a big supporter of Virtual Local Area Networks (VLANs) for security. Unfortunately, I have seen so many issues with this technology that I no longer believe it provides effective security.
It is easy for me to forget that just because I have taught a concept at one or two conferences, not everyone in the world has heard it. This was driven home with amazing clarity at the Hirschmann Critical Network Design Conference back in September when a participant asked me:
We use computers with two network cards as security between the control system and the business system. Is that a good idea?