Slow week in the SCADA security world.
Siemens announced some new security controls for the S7-1500 line of PLCs. The most interesting feature –“Access protection addresses the problem of protecting the application against unauthorized configuration changes.” We recommend cautious optimism until more details are available as the last Siemens PLC security announcement proved to be less than the press releases promoted. We have asked for the details and are hoping this is a major step forward. There is no pricing at this time, they are not taking orders, and it will not be available until February at the earliest.
We need to get more info on this SANS CyberCity project, especially what they are doing for the power plant.
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Worth Reading Articles
- Billy Rios Tridium Niagra – Directory Traversal – more for the story of its resolution than for the vuln
- Byres / Tofino Spoof on DCS Security Incident at the North Pole – clever
Critical Intelligence’s ICS Security Event Calendar Updates
- Northwest Public Power Association Cybersecurity 2013, Jan 23-25 in Tacoma, Washington
Critical Intelligence provides reports and other information products on Cyber Situational Awareness and Threat Intelligence services for Industrial Control System Owner/Operators, Vendors and Government stakeholders.
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It is worth clarifying a bit of information misrepresented above. Siemens did not introduce “new security controls for their S7-1500 line of controllers”, but rather has introduced from the ground up an entire new line of medium- to high-end controllers designed with many of the security features this site so often finds controllers and control vendors lack.
This past Summer, Siemens also released some pretty significant new communication processors for the S7-300 and S7-400 lines which also included some significant milestones in addressing many of the more serious vulnerabilities inherent to ICS protocols installed today.
It would be nice if some credit was given to Siemens, considering that they are learned from past shortcomings, and have done more for the top 5 vulnerabilities facing ENDPOINTS than most other ICS vendors.
Stay secure …
Joel – I’m hoping there will be much to praise in this new S7-1500 controller / CPU card or whatever it ends up being. At this point there it’s just an early, vague announcement (perfectly reasonable to build marketing buzz) that can’t be evaluated.
I could write more, but it would just be speculation. Let’s wait and see what it is.
Dale