A bit from last week and this week.

Eric Murphy completed his six part overview of the OPC DA protocol. In the series he gives a section by section synopsis. Faster than reading the whole document, but still gives the reader a lot of detail. Eric create a post with links to all six parts!

Wurldtech announced […]

We have two papers on security metrics at S4. The first is from Ralph Langner, who wrote the great paper on OPC server resource exhaustion attacks at S4 2007, and Bryan Singer who you all know. They both came in independently with similar abstracts, so it only made sense for them to pair up on […]

Travel to industry events can be difficult and out of reach of many budgets. And SCADA security research is going on around the world. So in the inaugural SCADA Security Scientific Symposium (S4) in Jan 2007 we offered a Virtual Attendee option. Virtual Attendees had a 3 pane display with live video, presentation slides, and […]

After the Congressional testimony in October, the panelists were provided with questions from committee members. Joe Weiss shares two along with his answers in his latest Unfettered entry.
Congressman McCaul asks “What are the principal differences between the ISA 99 standards and the NIST best practices found in Special Publication 800-53?”
I know and admire Joe, but […]

Saga may be overstated since the process did not take that long, but it was a classic example of why we don’t agree with leaving disclosure decisions up to the vendor - - or the researcher. Our approach is to let a coordination center, US-CERT in this case, determine what disclosure is appropriate.
On April 17th […]

The guys at Neutralbit in Barcelona continue to do great work. This time it is Xavi Panadero in the lead with assistance from Lluis Mora.
During a project they identified a serious vulnerability in Wondware’s Intouch Version 8.0 that was disclosed by US-CERT today. The default configuration settings of NetDDE allow an application with Net DDE […]

The calls from reporters continue to come in related to Aurora and Congressional Hearings on grid cyber security. There is a lot of talk and temptation for the government to bash the power industry. After all you don’t want to look soft on this issue.
After seeing a story on TSA still failing to stop bomb […]

How would a highly skilled and highly motivated hacker attack an application and system they had never seen before? Perhaps a critical infrastructure control system that some entity is willing to pay to have taken down or have access to or even control remotely.
This was the talk we wanted for our S4 2008 Day Two […]

First the good news. We are seeing substantial progress on patching Microsoft security vulnerabilities. Most vendors are testing applicable Microsoft patches on a timely basis and letting their clients know via support sites if the patched system continued to operate properly. Asset owners are further behind, but many have started to address deploying Microsoft patches […]

Ron Pawlowski of PNL takes a unique approach in his S4 paper. Assume the perimeter has been breached and the field device is being attacked, perhaps even successfully attacked. What security controls can be put in place “to help PCS computers right through, fight, and perhaps defeat an ongoing cyber attack”?
This is an appealing approach […]