SCADA Systems a Target for Hackers?

superstick58 writes "As a system integrator, I am often providing control solutions that utilize sophisticated Ethernet networks and as they say in the biz 'link top floor to shop floor.' Forbes has an article about the security issues that exist in SCADA systems. When I look back at some of the systems I have put in which include direct I/O control over ethernet and distributed HMI monitoring, if I can get access from the internet, it would be easy to bring down power for a plant or at the very least make operators in the building very uncomfortable. How vulnerable are the manufacturing centers of the world?"

Hacking SCADA makes sense

Being able to blow up physical devices is a lot more spectacular than playing with numbers in bank accounts which can be resotred from backups.

Re:Hacking SCADA makes sense

Forget manufacturing plants...

What if you could easily reproduce the East Coast Blackout of 2003 at will?

Hacking SCADA systems can do that for you...

Heh... What I could tell people...

Re:Large scale SCADA often uses the internet

Lots of things in life "should" be, but often aren't.

Such is laziness.

Re:Large scale SCADA often uses the internet

I've got a little story to share, a real world, actually happened example. Just a few years ago I was working as desktop support at a manufacturing plant. Facilities maintenance decided to place a web cam on top of the building so anyone could "check the weather." This was part of some project where environmental status of different parts of the facility was available through an internal website.
Who knows why they thought this was necessary but, they did it anyway without much consultation with the IT department. [red flag #1]
They published their little website where you could check out the air conditioner status and temperature of the various parts of the building and view the webcam. To see the webcam you had to logon with a specific username/password combination which they announced to everybody via email. [red flag #2]
Curious, I checked out the site and looked around. I found that the webcam had a different URL than the rest of the site so, being curious, I shortened the URL down one level at a time and ended up at a system administration logon page. [bad sign #1]
Surely the username/password for the webcam wouldn't work there so I tried it and promptly logged onto the facility controls console. [bad sign #2]
Surely I would only have limited or read only access so I checked out some of the features and areas of the console. I was able to access everything from heating/cooling, water, lighting and the factory waste handling system controls. [very bad sign #3]
Again, surely I had read only access so I tested one of the settings for the air system in our area of the building. I incrimented the value by 1 and clicked "save". It accepted my change. I changed the value back to it's original setting and saved it again. [VERY bad sign #4]
At this point I notified my supervisor that there may be a problem and showed him what I was able to do with the username/password that everybody in the company now had. A hasty meeting was called that day with myself and the head of facility management. I told him what I had found and we had a meeting with the vendor who installed the systems the next day.
In between the meetings, I checked out some more features of the controller system and found that I could ssh into it with the same password and username. The system ran a very stripped down Linux kernel and only had a few applications but I was able to add or remove or edit files from any directory on the system. So basically, the webcam username/password was effectively root on the whole system.
The installer was a typical heating/cooling installer type of guy. [red flag #3]
Computers obviously weren't his area of expertise. I understand that the company has people who "should" know about these sort of security measures, their developers. Why they sent a mechanical type of guy when they were told what our concerns were, I don't know. [red flag #4]
The scary and probably typical reaction I got from the vendor's installer was that there wasn't much of a problem because nobody in the factory would surely think of shortening a URL and find the main systems control login. [big red flag #5]
I finally got my point across and the vendor agreed to work with their developers to figure out a more secure setup. Fortunately the facility manager fully understood the consequences and wouldn't accept the vendors attempts at suggesting that it wasn't an issue.
Most everybody would think that simply changing the password would do the trick but apparently their setup was hard coded to only accept the one username and password for the whole system! At least that's what we were told at our meeting. To access the published webcam that was tied into this mess, you had to use the same credentials, otherwise none of this little setup of theirs would work and the administrative console would loose it's ability to monitor and control the factory systems. Brilliant! Absolutely genious.
Well, at the end of it all, apparently their developers had some sort of actual CLU

It wasn't in Die Hard 4

So it must be secure.

My view..

I work in Big Oil. We have SCADA systems, we have an HMI to control the facilities, and it's all ethernet based. But the network is on a completley different wire than our internet-accessible network. You can't connect to the internet from our control network -- the wire simply doesn't exist.

And it shouldn't. They should stay separate. Period.

Re:My view..

Well, unless it's some proprietary VPN protocol, you could just use a different client program that wasn't as strict about not letting you do things like bridge it. As long as you have the key, there's not a whole lot to stop you.

But I think what the GP was getting at was the risk of somebody having a workstation in the plant, somewhere, that's connected to both networks. If you have two NICs, and have the process-control network plugged into one, and the regular internet-accessible LAN plugged into the other, it's trivial to "accidentally" bridge them together.

Alternately, they could both just get plugged into one router or switch, and suddenly there's a path between them. A lot of weird things could happen if the two networks run alongside each other and there's not constant vigilance to keep people from doing something stupid.

In my office, we have separate subnets for different work areas. It works pretty well in terms of minimizing broadcast traffic and keeping people from accidentally printing to printers at the other end of the office, etc. But every few months they'll end up getting accidentally bridged by someone in a conference room plugging a wire from each subnet (they have separate jacks in the conference rooms, so that people can access their own area's stuff) into a switch. There's not really any malice involved -- people just see an Ethernet cable running from the wall towards a switch and notice it's unplugged, and they have a tendency to just jam it right in there.

Re:My view..

Are you absolutely sure? Doesn't the SCADA system connect to the internal corporate network somewhere? Don't managers want to see live plant operation data from their offices? At least the SCADA systems I've worked with have had a connection to the corporate network at some point. Usually through a dedicated SCADA system. I think in the end though, hackers don't want to actually have to buy the hardware they would need to test their methods out and if your corporate network has already been compromised, you're screwed anyway.

Re:My view..

Wow. Must be nice to have all your equipment on one site, or spread out along a pipeline that you own.

Some SCADA systems control diverse infrastructure scattered across areas bigger than any US state. As far as comms go, it's PSTN or nothing for places like that. Hard to keep your network scrupulously separated when you have to dial in to the remote sites!

Re:My view..

I worked as an intern for a municipal government IT department a while back, and had to do a site visit to a water filtration/pumping station. While I was there, I wandered down to one of the areas where the machines were that ran the pumps, valves, and other sundry devices. I found the workstation where two computers had been installed, one on the network to allow employees access to email, the intranet, and the internet. Beside it was another computer, which controlled the SCADA system for the plant and had root access to the entire city's water and sewer SCADA system. The plant manager assured me that they were totally seperate, and never the two should mix. Well, imagine my shock and surprise when I walked past the desk and tripped over a bright yellow patch cable that ran from the second (standby) network card into a small hub, that also fed the public terminal and then went to the internet port on the wall. I made a few notes, checked a few log files, then went and told the manager that the hub had to go and went back to the main IT office and reported. The answer I got? "So what? What could someone do with that?" As a demonstration, I took my noted, typed a few commands, and put a few nice words on top of the Wunderware logo on the terminal, then told the plant manager, who was still saying this was impossible, to check the screen. Turns out, an employee in the plant decided it was too much trouble to go between the computers, took the hub from a conference room upstairs, and made the connection. I wonder what might have happened if I opened that Cl2 valve or maybe closed a high pressure sewage line at the treatment facility? The weakest link in these systems is not the SCADA systems themselves, so to speak, but the people that use them daily, and managers that don't bother to look at the equipment on a regular basis, just to make sure it still looks like that nice drawing in the office.

NT4 On The Plant Floor

I know of many, many plant floor locations at some very large manufacturing facilities that still run NT4 on various devices. MS will release patches for these too, but only under quite special contracts.

It's kinda scary, really.

Re:NT4 On The Plant Floor

Naw, it would be the same problem. Just imagine being stuck on a Linux distribution 10 years old. Who's going to support you there? You'll be immediately told to upgrade to the latest and greatest fix your problems, but then your software may not function anymore. What's worse, is that I am not aware of any popular open source programs for industrial control systems.

Re:NT4 On The Plant Floor

But depending on the size of the facility, a programmer might not be cost effective. Your average IT guy might not have the skill-set to right Linux kernal patches, and even if you're a small facility in a large corporation, you might not have the same software running your SCADA system as any other plant.

Re:NT4 On The Plant Floor

NT4 was a nice operating system for SCADA applications. It was built in a time where Microsoft cared about security. One of NT4's design goals was Military security ratings. I liked the feature where you could tell the system to only run 9 different preset executables. It made it really tough to crack (until ActiveX and Internet Explorer came out.)

Pretty old news

Yes, SCADA systems are vulnerable to attack. Yes, they use old technology and rely on obscurity to keep them safe. Yes, theyre - to a large extent - hooked up in various fashions to the internet. Yes, you can cause big machines to do bad things this way that cause them to screw themselves up physically or hurt people nearby. The more interesting question here is why no one has seen (or at least admitted to have seen) an actual attack.

Re:Pretty old news

Well, lets say you are able to hack in. Would a bad guy know what to do with all those buttons and knobs without actually seeing the outcome from behind his computer screen? They would also need to retrieve a copy of the plant process diagram somehow, study it, and come up with a devious scheme to make the robots do something catastrophic. And a good safety system would have so many redundant independent interlocks, both physical and electronic, that it would be difficult to do any irreparable harm.

Re:Pretty old news

I don't know about that. Yes, taking control of the network and making things do what you want would require a lot of knowledge. Lots of hackers just like to "mess around" though and doing something that they think is l33t, like running a Quake server on a nuclear power plant network, could cause a lot of problems. These kinds of systems are not usually designed with a lot of redundancy at the software level. The people who build those kind of things just don't understand how to manage those kinds of things in software.

Case in point. Long ago I worked for a supercomputer manufacturer. Our system had a nifty temperature sensing and power control system that was all controlled from a small front end system, a 286 running Microport Unix. We could also do things like boot the system from that console and dial in to do remote diagnostics. I was working with a customer and he needed a patch so I started uploading it to main system via the modem link and a pass-through from the console into the main system (must have been Kermit). Things are moving along and then the main system crashes. For some reason it's overheating. OK, that's weird, we reboot and I start the upload again. System crashes again. About the third time we start putting two and two together and I go off and do some sleuthing around to figure out why that might cause a problem.

Well, it turns out that the hardware guys have the whole temperature and power control system running over an RS-232 line. Using a protocol that they designed that has no checksums, no framing, no resynchronization. And, a 286 running Microport is just not fast enough to handle two 9600 baud streams of data simultaneously and it starts dropping characters. Drop a few characters out of this unframed, unchecksummed data stream and it starts getting fan speed values (or whatever) mixed up with its temperature values and the control software thinks that the machines is melting down and turns it off - fast.

Our hardware guys were not stupid. They just weren't familiar with communications protocols, didn't bother to consult with the folks on the software side who were, and it had always worked in the lab and the field. I'm quite certain there are any number of pieces of software and hardware running around out there that would be very vulnerable to an unexpected change in the environment and the cascading effects would be incalculable.

Even if you do have safety protocols and interlocks in place, just shutting things down has costs. If you shut down a nuclear power plant, how much does it cost to bring it back on line? If you shut down a factory floor, how much does it cost you to not be producing, how much product will be spoiled and how much clean up will you have to do?

The risks are non-trivial and people believe that there networks are secure when in reality, someone probably installed a wireless access point somewhere or has a router bridging things (so that managers can look at "view only" data as one poster mentioned above) that just opens everything up.

Amazing

A "system integrator" working on his "sophisticated systems".. I was truly impressed until the lame a$$ question.

I'll answer though ... Just hide away until after Armageddon is over, I'll find you.. don't worry... really, just wait til I say it's safe to come out.

SCADA Systems are designed to be Failsafe

Generally, SCADA systems are not trusted. All systems have failsafe hardwired I/O that is designed to shutdown on failure. Unfortunately, the shutdowns can cost money.

I just got through getting a cell working after an extensive blast of repetitive downtime. I never did work out what exactly caused the failure, however high on my list of suspects is a router that may have been dropping packets due to excessive network load. When the router shutdown, the PLCs shutdown too. I'm just not clear on what caused all the excessive error packets on the network ... I have lots of theories, but no evidence.

These SCADA networks are designed to be operated in a fairly secure environment. They can't withstand errors or high network load. Botnet attacks, virus outbreaks, or someone hacking in can cause trouble. However, mostly I worry about much more mundane causes of downtime.

Microsoft Windows updates, particularly XP SP2, are notorious causes of SCADA system problems. Automatic installation of anti-virus software that triggers system reboots causes system to shutdown unexpectedly. Employees installing CPU-intensive screen-savers also cause headaches. Unexpected system changes result in unexpected system shutdowns. These unexpected shutdowns are what cause the economic disruptions.

Personally, I wonder how much longer we can deploy Microsoft Windows as a SCADA platform. Fast, simple and straightforward are key system goals for SCADA applications. Vista, which effectively requires networking, is a step in the wrong direction. Linux is much more secure, and can easily be set up with read-only partitions. Read-only memory seems to make the systems much more stable, as every reboot always reloads a secure, known-correct program image.

I call bullshit -- Die Hard 4 is FICTION!!!

I have worked with SCADA systems for the last 28 years, since I left college with an EE degree.

I have worked in two industries: electric power (both hydro and nuclear) and communication satellites.

Technologies are similar to those used in consumer systems for a purely practical reason, there's cheap hardware available. But the safeguards built into any industrial system are totally unbelievable for anyone used to consumer systems, and possibly also for people in banking or other businesses.

I once counted the redundancy levels in a transformer protection system. There were 63 (yes, sixty three) different levels of protection for a humble transformer costing a mere $5 million. Imagine the protection around a $5 billion power plant.

Possible in theory, but in real life it's more likely that you would be able to drop a helicopter by ramping a car up a toll booth.

How about Martrix?

I once counted the redundancy levels in a transformer protection system. There were 63 (yes, sixty three) different levels of protection for a humble transformer costing a mere $5 million. Imagine the protection around a $5 billion power plant.

I saw Tiffany drove a bike into the security station, blew up everything in her path then bought down the entire power-grid by with a single ssh nuke. She did it all in less than 5 minutes.

63 levels of protection doesn't give me more assurance sorry.

But since your mentioned the plant hires Transformers for protection or something, I do believe these alien robots could stand some chance.

Wow, what an awesome opportunity for a shameless p

I happen to be a developer who is working to protect SCADA systems.

Because the systems are what they are, we are protecting them by putting protective devices in front of them -- either sitting behind a device on the phone line or sitting behind a protective router. Then, the lack of security in SCADA devices will be largely irrelevant, since you can't hack a device you can't access. It would be a matter of hacking into our devices, which are designed with a bit more security in mind.

I dread the idea of seeing our company name showing up in some hacker conference, but I'm kinda eager for some black-hat-vs-white-hat action.

Many SCADA run on windows

Many SCADA system run on Windows, while some older DCS (distributed control system) run on UNIX or QNX. National Instruments have a version that runs on linux. There is also automationx.ca that supposedly have a SCADA system that runs on Linux. None of the other popular choice; Rockwell, Siemens, GE, Omron have a HMI that runs on Linux or other os that windows. If something ever comes to Linux it will most likely be from Siemens, as they are German and more open to SUSE. Regardless the windows part on a SCADA system is the supervisory and data acquisition, the actual control is normally done by a PLC. Someone can hack the PC-HMI and change the control setpoint, (ie start water pump No 1 when level is at 45m instead of 44m) safe operational upper and lower limits can be hard coded into the PLC (including interlocks) this filters out a lot of hackers since they need to get into the PLC.

GG PENG (Electrical and Computer)

Air-Gap

They're safe as long as they are isolated from public networks. The problem is that there is a huge temptation to use the Internet to enable remote monitoring and control, as it is much cheaper and simpler than extending a private network and installing dedicated workstations at remote locations. Many managers will ignore security concerns when they see an opportunity for large cost savings.

Well I build them...

and at some point they're all connected to an outside connection.
Every customer my company has has a main site and a backup site. With redundancy in the main site as well (hot and standby servers, sans, etc). But most have remote clients that can connect to view data (corporate users) however maybe only 1 in 50 are actually tied in to the corporate domain. they're usually separate systems.

As far as the industry I've seen this in, oil & gas, as well as the water and waste water systems for a lot of medium size cities in north america. They also have a slew of international customers as well and the designs are pretty universal. How easy is it to break in and damage stuff? The software and protocols are all proprietary, and in fact most of the packets show up as "malformed" in wireshark. My guess is to really do damage they'd have to either be intimately familiar with the product (i.e. an ex-employee) or they'd have to find a way to take down the main site and backup site completely at once. These are always in geographically different locations.

who here works at

the big beer company in St Louis ?

But of course!

SCADA systems, until recently, weren't build with security in mind; kinda like running everyting 'root' because you have a decent firewall. I used to program them; imagine blowing open a 3', 500psi natural gas pipeline?

SO MUCH MORE fun than hanging up an airport for hours, now isn't it?

Though, I'm not sure how far they'd really get...all these devices are different...kinda like Linux boxes. What works on a Vax with a communications network to controllers will be different from site to site...and they'd need to get the nomenclature from the inside. It would still be non-trivial, and the 'testing' to learn the system might tip off the Feds.

It's like the first time someone mentioned blowing up buses/trains; if there are people involved and a spectacular media coverage, it's a target. (Shouldn't be a big surprise, actually)

Simple attacks are best

For a few years I worked for the federal government doing electronics at airports. My cow-irkers and I spent a fair amount of time worrying about security issues. We were able to dream up lots of sophisticated attacks that would bring the aviation industry to its knees. We could have carried out those attacks. The trouble was that we were the only ones who could have done it. All of the attacks relied on at least one piece of information that no outsider could have accessed.

It became obvious to us that we didn't have to worry about the sophisticated attacks. As one of my buddies pointed out, it was far easier to plant a bomb in the middle of a runway than it was to carry out the attacks that we dreamed up. Protecting against the sophisticated attacks was relatively simple.

We remembered the war in Viet Nam (too bad a certain president didn't) and knew how much damage the Viet Cong could do with a few shit covered sticks. We became convinced that we had to worry about simple low tech attacks. What worried us was that we had no idea what those attacks would be. This was twenty years before 911. We had no concept of suicide bombers and terrorists using box cutters to take over airplanes were far beyond what we could imagine.

My experience

Our SCADA systems were located on an isolated network. Recently though the company has been moving in the same direction (top floor -> shop floor). The key for us has been that those components that are accessible from the corporate side are view only. Control of critical systems should ALWAYS be on an isolated network, whatever the plant super or whoever else thinks. If a suit feels like changing some part of the process, they should have to walk their happy asses down and change it on the floor system. That gives the operators a chance to bitch at him for making unnecessary changes anyway. ;)

MS has a denial of service attack on accounts?

With Microsoft's "security", you only need a user account name to deny use of a user's system.
3 failed log in attempts lock out the legitimate user, even if the account is presently logged in!

Say, your buddy is working under a certain user name, try that name 3 times with the wrong password and his account will lock, outlook goes nuts.
Outlook then asks for a password because the mail server (Exchange) denies SMTP access, the user tires to reboot to "fix it" and cannot log in till his account is reset. This is only funny till someone uses scripts to lock out about 500+ accounts, the Admin will be busy......

And you never "really" get access.....
LOL

IBM/ISS has security services for SCADA

http://www.iss.net/solutions/regulatory_complian ce/scada_programs.html

warning: marketing speech ahead..!!

Solution Packages for SCADA Security Compliance

SCADA Quick Start Program

The ISS SCADA Quick Start Program results in a thorough understanding of best security practices for your organization, and the development of detailed project plans for meeting the requirements.

Moderators:

Members of ISS X-Force Professional Services; A worldwide, elite team of security professionals, specializing in ISS adaptive network security tools and methodologies, as well as distributed computing system and network security.

Benefits to Participants:

* Access to industry-leading knowledge about best security practices for SCADA systems, and risk assessment methodologies, based upon research by the ISS X-Force Intelligence team; ISS' leading group of over 40 security experts, dedicated to proactive counter-intelligence, research, development and public education against online threats.

* Rapid availability of customized implementation documentation that organizations can begin to use immediately, including a tailored project charter document, SCADA compliance road map and detailed project plan for implementing SCADA Security Standards in their organizations.

* Save months of research time by utilizing security experts who have market leading risk management and industry-best practices expertise.

Program Details:

* 2 Days of Training - SCADA Security Standards and Introduction to Security Management

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Script Kiddies + SCADA...

im in ur power plant retractin ur control rods

Easy as pie

SCADA systems are incredibly vulnerable. Anyone who "Calls Bullshit" or whatever else they'd like to say just doesn't know what they're talking about. SCADA systems _have_ been compromised. Comrpromising them is _easy_ if you can get access to the network, as 99% of the protocols are clear text, snoop the wire for a while to decode the protocol, then do some simple replays to take control. Or easier yet, just take control of the HMI. If you do it right no one will even know.

Or too impatient for that? Try attacking one of the wireless SCADA networks, yes, critical infrastructure like gas pipelines running over "wireless."

So far the biggest thing that has kept them secure is people in the mainstream hacking community simply haven't known they exist. But that's changed. Keeping SCADA systems seperate from "Corporate" systems isn't easy for most utilities as they simply don't have the money to invest in dual infrastructure, or they don't know what they're doing so don't, or management (as usual) as full of nitwits so wont trump up the cash...

DHS has a Control Systems Cyber Security program which may have interesting reading for the curious, also see INL labs which do a lot of work on hacking SCADA systems, and NIST has some big put-you-to-sleep style doco on standards around SCADA security.

Cheers
e

I develop scada software... Forbes is FUD

The long story short is that most of these installations are physically protected from intrusion. First rate firewalling, and in most cases, complete seperation of internet and operations systems are in place. Physical alarms and access controls, id badges, and real security guards do the rest.

I am not naive enough to suggest that any such situation is 100% perfect, but at the very least, we are not talking about script kiddies. If someone has a real reason or agenda to break into these systems, and enough money and skillful crackers, they will get in.

For example, WiFi ethernet networks are almost never used in these types of systems -- that doesn't have the engineering necessary for this kind of data. Instead, proprietary solutions with microwave dishes, and other forms of FCC/CRTC licensed data radios are used. While proprietary != secure, it does mean that a wardriver looking for an open access point isn't equiped to mess with these systems.

Furthermore, scada systems have some intelligence on the terminal ends: hard wired or epromed/flashed programs running that usually have safety cutouts that prevent the hardware from doing something bad by dropping into a safe state.

I won't go on boring everyone with the details, but what it comes down to is that the systems are sufficiently complex that it is cheaper, easier, and more effective to physically disrupt them, so there is not much point hacking or cracking them.

In any case, in the automation world, this was news about 2 months ago, and taken into account in plant operations (mostly by noticing that the physical security and networking configurations prevent the attacks from the outside to begin with) without the kind of panic that Forbes is trying to fob out the unsuspecting C.O's (thats a regex .)

This has been done for years

The right way: As simple as will get the job done. Its been used on the space shuttle since the beginning. When you hear the three computers agree, this is three 1802, a 1MHz 8-banger that was approved for this 30 years ago. The other "certified perfect" piece of hardware is the i486. Sure a few more may have been added, but nothing 'hi-tech'.

What kind of line speed does it take to say, control the dijkes. This is not the place to say _exactly_ how its done, but I'm not afraid of a break. Trains are the other extreme, you need a real computer. The embedded boxes that take the measurements are simple in design, a PIC or 1802, a world favourite in payphones.

Going on the net can't be all that bad, but as one writer noted, thoughtlessly designed systems lock out the rightful user. Of course, never run ssh on port 22 and if life is on the line, a telephone backup must be used. "Fuzzing" is over rated, sure it crashes poorly designed systems, but well designed systems would have to be flooded quite fast to prevent a 'distress signal'. (Upstream the networks are well monitored.) I will always remember the first security lesson from a German professor: Rule No.1 NO Microsoft products!

My biggest fear is the possibility (actually quite easy) of spoofing an IP of a rightful owner. These addresses must either be secrets or rotated often, preferably both. Still a dedicated network, where management can only look and then pick up the phone is almost mandatory if human life is at stake. True fast hopping radio can be most secure, stealth and 'unjamable'. Fibre is secure too.

It is rather remarkable with this publicly known for years and even popular music (figure out that yourself) telling how to do it, it hasn't been a problem. Broadcast and cable is totally vulnerable, though breaches rarely occur. It is rather commonplace to control a TV sender through a DTMF telephone: Would you know what to do if you got in? In a real war, things could go from bad to worse. Social engineering would be a primary tool. (Could anything be easier to social engineer than the military?) Loose lips do bad things. Its all about logic to do it right. Its scary to see sysadmins use Windows for stupid reasons like: "It works best on my laptop". Then don't use it for anything else!

It is so often when doing a security audit, you hear: "I let my kids play games and surf the web". On company computers that do important things. Damn. Don't use Windows and keep your computer to yourself.

BillSF

Don't hack the SCADA, hack the PLC

Most automation systems have a PLC controlling the hardware. The SCADA is just the UI to the control system.

A PLC is a (generally) unprotected, unencrypted proprietary ethernet connected box. The only protection is that it is proprietary, but that protection has been diminished now that most are connected to Ethernet.

The interlocks etc that people are talking about above often actually reside in the PLC. You don't need a password to manipulate the memory in a PLC. Just a write command using the standard protocol for the PLC will do it.

SCADA PLC Hardware

The major manufacturers have not bothered to protect access to their PLC's, and with the recent Ethernet revolution in control systems, this makes them very vulnerable.

The majority of control systems I have seen are completely unprotected once you get onto the LAN. Unfortunately there is an attitude that it will never happen to us.

I have no experience in big oil or in power stations, but I have seen this problem in some airport operations, and industrial automation in general.

Hardened automation devices are just not demanded of PLC manufacturers by their customers, as they are not aware of the risks.

Disclaimer: I've been out of the industry for a couple of years, but the industry is very slow moving, so I doubt much has changed.

System Integration can kill ...

I to read the Forbes article, but I can approach it from a unique view point.

For the past 5 years I have been doing research work on SCADA or control system security.
Some of the research findings are astounding. No one can die if a hacker port scans a printer and ruins your print job, but people can die if a hacker port scans some SCADA devices and knocks them offline.

Here's why;

Back in the good-old-days most of the SCADA/Control system networks were isolated, proprietary, and in general a real pain in the ass to get to let alone do anything with. With the Internet explosion, along comes a push from the Marketing departments, and management to integrate all system. The old days everything was serial ... now they must become "ethernet enabled". Why ? Because they want to know what's coming off the assembly line, right now!

Law of supply and demand; customers demanded it, equipment vendors tried to supply it. Note; tried. Think about it people, you have equipment manufactures that have been living in there own little world for 30-40 years, now being asked to hook up to standard office style infrastructure, integrate and play well with others. Unfortunately, most equipment manufactures simply took their serial protocols from their proprietary network, wrapped the data frames up in TCP and called it an afternoon.

Serial style protocols with little to no authentication, traveling over a wire and hitting a device with as cheap an ethernet to serial converter as money can buy.
Yes folks there's nothing like doing a security audit and knowing you could launch a DoS attack on you clients network with a 9600 kbps modem :-) why ? Cause that's all the poor little device's moto entry level Mac Classic CPU and handle while still running it's production process logic.

Companies/SCADA equipment users themselves are also to blame for the security shambles that SCADA/Control network. Along with in "integration push", came this novel thing called the web. And wouldn't it be nice to use a web-browser to check you production devices status, and control it? Problem being, this production device was design and manufactured before the web craze took off.

    Side Note: One of the biggest differences between SCADA/Industrial networks and the office/admin style networks; Average equipment life in the SCADA network can easily be 15-20 years.

Try squeezing an embedded webserver onto a piece of equipment from the late 80's. Not much memory, storage, or processing power to play with. Somethings got to go; might as well be those pesky extra checks on the network data coming in :-) . These companies can't totally blame there Control Process Engineers. Those guys know their control gear, not network security. They really need people whom have their feet planted firmly in both worlds.

If you thought that the vulnerability window between Microsoft-bug fix and application of the patch was bad; at least it can now be measured in days, or months. In the SCADA environment, I've seen and heard deployment and fix estimates of several years.

Fortunately; a large number of the major SCADA equipment vendors have woken up and smelled the coffee.
Within the last 2 years, there's been an explosion of interest in actually fixing the problem,

in conclusion;
    Is it as bad as Forbes makes it out to be ?
        In some areas, it's better, in others, far worse.

Cheers

    Yogi

 

Rule#1 physical separation.

There MUST be NO network connectivity between the production systems and the Internet. If you really NEED a gateway, put a wetware firewall, reading off one screen, typing on a keyboard attached to the other. Then apply physical protection of the internal network. Employees inside might have a network access, say, on laptops with wireless, but the production network should be totally isolated.

security researchers and amnesia ..

"In January of 2003, SCADA system computers infected with the Slammer worm caused a blackout at the Davis-Besse power plant in Ohio", Forbes

'The Slammer worm penetrated a private computer network at Ohio's Davis-Besse nuclear power plant in January and disabled a safety monitoring system for nearly five hours [theregister.co.uk] '

"Seven months later, another computer virus was widely suspected of preventing the detection of power loss at a plant providing electricity to parts of New York State", Forbes

'TRANSCRIPTS of telephone conversations between utility operators prior to last month's power blackout in the US and Canada [theinquirer.net] '

"Seven months later, another computer virus was widely suspected by security researchers of leading to a power loss at a plant providing electricity to parts of New York State, despite the Nuclear Regulatory Commission's argument that no evidence of virus-involvement was found"

'The task force responsible for investigating the cause of the Aug. 14 blackout that crippled most of the Northeast corridor of the U.S. and parts of Canada [castlecops.com] concluded that a software failure at FirstEnergy Corp. may have contributed significantly to the outage'

'On the day of the blackout, Blaster [computerworld.com] degraded the performance of several communications lines linking key data centers used by utility companies to manage the power grid, the sources confirmed'

Safety Concerns ...

I spent a brief period developing HMI boxes for controlling big metal-processing machines. Our customers liked to keep the control systems as tightly coupled to the machinery as possible and would get very nervous at even the *suggestion* of some kind of remoting. These big machines emit a good bit of EM-interference which could have a significant impact on communications equipment, not to mention the fact that they really didnt like the idea of someone operating the machine not being in front of it.

In the end we were able to persuade them to go with a limited remote terminal based on a CAN network. Their initial safety concerns were allayed when we told them its the same networking protocol that controls the Brakes in their Mercs ...

Now, that was just about acceptable, but to even have these machines with the *capability* of being controlled over the ethernet, (perhaps) and then HTTP across the www is tantamount to irresponsibility. It would be a slip-up on the part of everyone in the development chain: Engineers, Buyers, Managers, and even the Operators if they know about it!

Real world experience

A client of mine is in the waste management industry and over the last fourty years has grown in size from his humble beginnings of picking up recyclables in the back of his pickup truck, to running a multi-million dollar a year operation that includes the ownership of two power plants to burn green waste. He is an insanely smart individual but he has so many plates spinning at the same time that he rarely has time to completely grasp the subtle nuiances involved in implementing everything that he asks for. In the case of the power plants he wanted to be able to monitor them in real time from 500+ miles away. The only internet connection at the facility was used by the power plant staff, and of course they were all over Myspace and MSN and all the typical security nightmares. There was no way in hell that I was putting the control systems anywhere near the facility network. My solution was to pull a secondary line exclusively for the control system. That was a huge fight because the client couldn't understand why they needed another "Internet" when they already had one of them. After winning that battle, I setup a VPN back to the main office and then ran VNC to give him access to the machines that he wanted to look at. I'm sure that there was a better solution than VNC, but my client is a cheap bastard^H^H^Hfiscally conservative individual and he didn't want to pay for the remote solution that was offered by the vendor who installed the control system. Despite his chea^H^H^H^H conservative nature, he did see the necessity of paying for redundant server hardware so I can't fault him too much.

And for those of you who are curious, no, it doesn't run on Linux. All of the control systems are Windows based and run on Server 2003 Standard. I'm 99% certain it comes from either Honeywell or Siemens.

Re:And they thought Bophal was bad...

Well if it's an interlock safety system, vs. a SCADA system, it has no business being on the plant network. It should be programmed once and then operated in place.