Fergie's Tech Blog

SCADA Watch: America's Hackable Backbone

Andy Greenberg writes on Forbes.com:

The first time Scott Lunsford offered to hack into a nuclear power station, he was told it would be impossible. There was no way, the plant's owners claimed, that their critical components could be accessed from the Internet. Lunsford, a researcher for IBM's Internet Security Systems, found otherwise.

"It turned out to be one of the easiest penetration tests I'd ever done," he says. "By the first day, we had penetrated the network. Within a week, we were controlling a nuclear power plant. I thought, 'Gosh. This is a big problem.'"

In retrospect, Lunsford says--and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission agrees--that government-mandated safeguards would have prevented him from triggering a nuclear meltdown. But he's fairly certain that by accessing controls through the company's network, he could have sabotaged the power supply to a large portion of the state. "It would have been as simple as closing a valve," he says.

posted by Fergie @ 8/24/2007 10:43:00 AM