Some facilities such as water treatment plants and natural gas pipelines were found to be vulnerable to a buffer overflow attack months ago and have only recently been patched. There’s no evidence that the systems were compromised, but if they had been, attackers would have had access to some vital controls.

Security experts say the finding highlights the possibility that hackers could cut the power to entire cities, poison a water supply by disrupting water treatment equipment, or cause a nuclear power plant to malfunction by attacking the utility’s controls.

Experts also said that the flaw was not difficult to find and that more of these systems are being exposed to the Internet, making it more likely that an attack will occur.

Of course it is against policy that these systems are exposed to the Internet, but that does not prevent some companies from allowing them to be connected to the same routers as the rest of the network.

Hopefully, there are more instructions in place than simply, “Don’t connect this to the Internet.” Otherwise, we are bound to see more of this. It also helps to assume the worst, especially when protecting such important systems.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 11th, 2008 at 5:33 pm by Mike Markiewicz and is filed under data protection. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.