America's Critical Infrastructure Is Vulnerable To Cyber Attacks

[mahatmakanejeeves]

America's Critical Infrastructure Is Vulnerable To Cyber Attacks

Opinion 11/11/2014 @ 6:07PM

Guest post written by Michael Assante
Mr. Assante is director of Industrial Control Systems as well as Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition Networks for the SANS Institute.

America’s critical infrastructure—the utilities, refineries, military defense systems, water treatment plants and other facilities on which we depend every day—has become its soft underbelly, the place where we are now most vulnerable to attack.

Over the past 25 years, hundreds of thousands of analog controls in these facilities have been replaced with digital systems. Digital controls provide facility operators and managers with remote visibility and control over every aspect of their operations, including the flows and pressures in refineries, the generation and transmission of power in the electrical grid, and the temperatures in nuclear cooling towers. In doing so, they have made industrial facilities more efficient and more productive.

But the same connectivity that managers use to collect data and control devices allows cyber attackers to get into control system networks to steal sensitive information, disrupt processes, and cause damage to equipment. Hackers, including those in China, Russia and the Middle East, have taken notice. While early control system breaches were random, accidental infections, industrial control systems today have become the object of targeted attacks by skilled and persistent adversaries.
....

The threat isn’t static

Businesses continue to believe that cybersecurity issues can be addressed solely through technology. The problem was created by technology so the solution must be more technology, they reason, ignoring the spirit of Einstein’s observation that “no problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it.” ... Technology is static and the threat is not. Hackers will always find a way to beat technology-based solutions. That’s why we have to do more than create barriers to keep out intruders. We have to man our digital borders with people who have the same skill and determination as the attackers.

[Downwinder]

1. It all started with Stuxnet virus.