Your tax dollars at work… A Sandia National Labs worker who used her computer access and position to “cyber-stalk” rock star Chester Bennington (of Linkin Park fame) was sentenced to two years in prison last week. This took place over the course of nearly a year in 2006 and involved hacking several of Bennington’s [...]

The Control System Cyber Security Self-Assessment Tool (CS2SAT) was presented at the PCSF Annual Meeting earlier this month. I had promised a review of this tool, and it takes place in two parts. The facts of the CS2SAT are in a SCADApedia entry and my comments on the CS2SAT are here in this blog entry.
Overall, [...]

It probably is not a big surprise to loyal blog readers that I received several off-the-record calls on the “What does it mean? INL Testing LiveData ICCP Server”. The main reason for off-the-record is it takes a whole process to issue comments even to a blog / pseudo-press. Here are a few things I can [...]

This is a blog entry I’ve written and erased many times over the past year. Idaho National Labs (INL) has made numerous PR splashes for “testing” a variety of control system applications and systems. The LiveData ICCP server is the latest with a press release issued last week.
For a while now I have had a [...]

SCADA vendors place their money and effort developing features that are demanded by potential clients in RFP’s. At least that is the thought behind the effort by the Multi-State ISAC / SANS / INL funded by DHS NCSD to develop cyber security procurment language for control systems. Draft 1.5 is out this month, and we [...]

In an earilier entry I linked to the INL/DHS site that will be a resource for the community. The site is early in its development and will be filled with numerous recommended practices, white papers, case studies and other useful info. My own bias is the sooner we can get this info out the better, [...]

One of the real challenges in securing SCADA networks, especially over a shared or exposed WAN, is the SCADA protocols do not authenticate the source of the communications or the data integrity. If an attacker can access the WAN, she can send commands to a field device or responses to a control server. This vulnerability [...]

While I think the Overview of Vulnerabilities is definitely good stuff (and in my wildest dreams I could never hope to draw diagrams that cool, Mac or no Mac) from a purists perspective, the clickable “Secure Architecture Design” image sometimes left me scratching my head.
Let’s click on control systems firewall.
So we get links to a [...]

INL, Sandia, PNL and other industry organizations working with DHS have developed a large amount of SCADA security knowledge, especially over the past three years. Too often this knowledge was stuck in the labs. Recognizing this, DHS has worked with the labs to begin pushing more of this information out to the SCADA security community.
Yesterday [...]

INL and the other national labs have a great deal of information and experience from the SCADA Test Bed, assessments and other work in this area. They are trying to find an efficient and organized way to share this with the community.
To that end INL has created a Recommended Practices Committee to vet recommended practice [...]