One of the true benefits of the recently released Portaledge Enumeration module is that it allows administrators to really see and understand what is communicating on their control systems. In talking with one of our early adopters, they noted that they had many more machines talking than what they previously thought. They used the alerts [...]

I wanted to give everybody a quick update regarding the Portaledge project. We have been working on a number of items to improve the quality of packages we have already released while we are working on the next sections of the project. Here is an overview of the improvements we have made:

We added [...]

First – Don’t forget to get your abstracts in to present a paper at S4 2010 in January in beautiful Miami Beach. The deadline for submission is Sept 15th, and we have some papers already accepted so don’t miss your chance.
This weeks online paper from past S4 events is from Ludovic Piètre-Cambacédès and Pascal Sitbon [...]

NERC “is launching a new Task Force to review the reliability impacts of Smart Grid“. They are accepting nominations for Task Force volunteers.
Byres Security announced this week that their Tofino technology will be used in the Hirschmann line of ruggedized firewalls and security products. This is interesting because last year Hirschmann dumped the Innominate technology [...]

You may have noticed that I’ve broadened focus in recent weeks to talk more about control system scanning and assessment with Nessus beyond Bandolier. There is more of that to come but here are some Bandolier updates in the meantime:

Soon we’ll be starting a case study of an asset owner using Bandolier to help with [...]

We talked about web application assessment with Nessus in a recent post. Since then, the Tenable folks have produced a video tutorial demonstrating the expanded web assessment options. If you are using Nessus on your control system networks, it is definitely worth checking out.
A test or development lab is a good place to start with [...]

Renaud Deraison is the primary author of the Nessus vulnerability scanner and was interviewed on a recent PaulDotCom Security Weekly podcast. It was fun to hear Renaud’s take on a variety of topics including the origins of Nessus and the move from open to closed source. One thing in particular caught my interest, though — [...]

A few items from recent weeks:

Byres Security announced the Tofino field security device now offers a VPN feature. Ease of installation was stressed given the possibility of limited IT security experience in the operations group.
EnergySec is holding their two-day annual summit, Sept 23-24 in Seattle, WA. It is already half full and an agenda has [...]

Back in January I did a blog on ‘Functional’ Programming Paradigm & Control System Security.
In that blog I mentioned that Microsoft is one of the most notable adopters of functional programming languages. To facilitate formal verification Microsoft has created a modified version of the OCAML programming language they call F#. [...]

In a world of remotely exploitable vulnerabilities and inherently vulnerable protocols, permissions on a control system server may seem insignificant. With 20+ Bandolier security audit files under my belt, though, I have a different opinion.
Think about all the application resources that get installed on a server or workstation – files, directories, shared directories, services, DCOM, [...]