[UPDATE, 12/1/2011: Apparently this was not a hacker, but a legitimate employee who happened to be vacationing in Russia and logged in to check the system. The pump in question burned out on its own. However, the point remains: Crucial systems like this should not be exposed to the public Internet.]
Or perhaps just sloth or false economy.
Foreign hackers caused a pump at an Illinois water plant to fail last week, according to a preliminary state report. Experts said the cyber-attack, if confirmed, would be the first known to have damaged one of the systems that supply Americans with water, electricity and other essentials of modern life.
Somebody PLEASE explain to me why these vital systems are on the publicly-accessible Internet.
I don’t care what kind of security you think you have, any security system can be broken by the application of sufficient computing power.
This just seems like laziness and false economy to me. If something needs to be monitored, then a technician can bloody well be paid to sit at a control panel and monitor it. Control systems should be required to be isolated from the public Internet and not left open so that the operator can be getting a good night’s sleep at home until something goes wrong.
In a distributed system with centralized control (power grid, gas pipelines, water pumping stations), dedicated private data lines from the controlled system to the controller should be required. Expensive? Yes. But unless a hacker wants to go out and physically tap the line, there’s no way to get into the system.
H/T.