Nice marketing piece, Geoff... Hey - don't take this personally - I have no arguement with you. But your logic is so well... it's so uh... uh... it's uh... it's so lacking, dude.
Geoff Shively wrote: > Power outages related to DCOM Worm, are SCADA and DCS WiFi Accessible? Are you asking the question or making an assertion? The answer is no, in most cases, they're not WiFi accessible. > Some > have said that they are accessible via WiFi and a potential attacker could > break protection mechanisms thus gaining access to control and acquired > data. Some have said, huh. Who are these authoritative folks? > Is there any truth to this, any SCADA, DCS, or HMI experts on the > list? Probably not. This is a wireless list. > > Furthermore, there has been allot of talk on bugtraq, full disclosure, and > dsheild about the latest American power crisis being caused by malicious > computer activities or worm. Lots of talk, eh?? Gosh, I guess that makes it true, No? > > A bit of background on the systems that control power facilities. > Distributed control systems (DCS) and supervisory control and data > acquisition (SCADA) systems are the key elements of facility control. remote > terminal units "RTU". SCADA runs under Win2000 / XP and the telemetry to > the RTU is accessible via the Internet. So these control systems are Internet accessible, huh? Got any convincing proof of that? > > SCADA (Supervisory Control And Data Acquisition) and DCS (Distributed > Control Systems) are highly vulnerable to attack. Oh really, can't you be more specific? But wait, your just throwing a bunch of acronyms around, huh? No real facts there... > An attacker could very > well penetrate these systems to make changes or implement simple scripts to > cause a legitimate operator to make unnecessary changes to a large scale > power grid. "Very well penetrate" - what a convincing argument. > These changes could result in massive failure causing an > international power crisis. The changes that you assert "could" have taken place? > > Be it from a worm or home grown hack, these latest power failures were > unlikely to have been caused by a physical failure that would have surfaced > by now. Thanks for your expert analysis and opinion, oops, you're not really an expert are you? > Power failures from the years past have brought about legislation > and system changes that deal with most large scale issues as they arise to > mitigate risk of large scale failure, whatever happened this time was a new > problem the industry was not prepared for. Oh, the industry may be pretty well prepared, Geoff. They may in fact have created the problem themselves to get the government (Oopps... I mean the taxpayers) to give them 50 or 60 billion dollars to "upgrade" the grid (continuing to artificially reduce the supply of power and then trade power at inflated rates at a huge profit) and make it easier for them to rip off the nation like they have already ripped-off California. Oh my God, maybe now I'm the crackpot who's gone "over the edge". Well, at least that will lend YOU some credibility and make your marketing efforts suddenly look legitimate. Don't say I never gave you anything! > > We know that SCADA and DCS systems are supplied by one of 5 major vendors > and these system are advertised on the vendors websites to run Microsoft > Windows versions 95, 2000 and NT. Also advertised is DCOM and RPC support > within these systems, RPC/DCOM recently became famous as the Lovsan/Blaster > worm exploited this protocol to spread across the internet. With this said > it is likely It's very truly "likely", Geoff - because you said that it's likely.... that makes it true, No? > that an infected system infected a SCADA or DCS, and could be "could be" > > why we are seeing large scale outages across the country. This is not a > Microsoft problem as many would like to say, though it is a problem with > patch management. > > Below is documentation on the problem, the first one sums up the problem > nicely (DCOM > and SCADA white papers): Holy crap!!! With a pile of documents as high as the sky, how can you possibly be wrong? > > http://www.automationtechies.com/sitepages/pid641.php > > http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/cyberwar/view/ > > http://www.scada-system.com/scada-software-windows.htm > > http://www.data-acquisition-software.com/index.htm > > Cheers, Cheers, Geoff.... and thank you again for such a well-planted marketing piece - opps I mean such an accurate, informative, scientific and enlightening post. I'll look forward to your next post where you'll tell us how to use WiFi to take over control of cruise missiles. jack > Geoff Shively, CHO > PivX Solutions, LLC > > Are You Secure? > http://www.pivx.com -- Jack Unger - President, Wireless InfoNet Inc. Author of the WISP Handbook - "Deploying License-Free Wireless WANs" http://www.ask-wi.com/book.html True Vendor-Neutral WISP Training-Troubleshooting-Consulting http://www.ask-wi.com/services.html Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Phone: (818)227-4220
