Industrial Controls 101
- The types of industrial control systems, how they work, and the common challenges and threats.Beyond all the doom-laden headlines on a possible "digital Pearl Harbor" scenario, how great is the actual risk and where is it most likely to emerge?The ICS-CERT released a security bulletin that detailed a vulnerability in the technology used to control the systems used by power plants. If exploited, cybercriminals could gain control of such facilities, effectively crippling the national infrastructure.Due to operational "optimization", the SCADA threat landscape now begins to look a lot like the network security landscape that we all know and respect — one of constant vigilance and constant defensive threat posture.Why SCADA systems should never be connected in any way, shape, or form to the public Internet, and how business decisions over the course of the past 15 years have allowed the "public" and "private" networks to become dangerously close in p