Thousands of SCADA, ICS Devices Exposed Through Serial Ports 66
Trailrunner7 writes "Serial port servers are admittedly old school technology that you might think had been phased out as new IT, SCADA and industrial control system equipment has been phased in. Metasploit creator HD Moore cautions you to think again. Moore recently revealed that through his Critical IO project research, he discovered 114,000 such devices connected to the Internet, many with little in the way of authentication standing between an attacker and a piece of critical infrastructure or a connection onto a corporate network. More than 95,000 of those devices were exposed over mobile connections such as 3G or GPRS. 'The thing that opened my eyes was looking into common configurations; even if it required authentication to manage the device itself, it often didn't require any authentication to talk to the serial port which is part of the device,' Moore told Threatpost. 'At the end of the day, it became a backdoor to huge separate systems that shouldn't be online anyway. Even though these devices do support authentication at various levels, most of the time it wasn't configured for the serial port.'"
Re:How is this news? (Score:3, Funny)