Fergie's Tech Blog

SCADA Watch: Cyber Spies Hack Power Grid - Those in the Know, Knew!

Elan Winkler writes on the McAfee Security Insights Blog:

Last month the press was abuzz with the news that the US electric grid has been hacked by foreign operatives. To anyone who has studied security in the power industry, this isn’t much of a surprise.

Last fall (Aug/Sept 08), I conducted a survey of 200 critical infrastructure operators (the people who actually work in the industry and KNOW what’s what) on what they thought of the safety of our power grid. 60% of them told me that the energy sector was unprepared to stave off a major attack. They also felt that the power grid was the number one target ripe to be exploited (27%). 50% of them told me that our critical infrastructure had already been successfully attacked.

So, if the people in the know, knew, how come we’re still vulnerable? I asked them that question as well. The number one answer: cost. Number two: complacency. No real surprises there; those are the same answers that we used to get from IT departments 15 years ago on why they didn’t have defense in depth technologies set up to protect servers and databases.

posted by Fergie @ 5/05/2009 09:52:00 PM