Author: admini

“The exposure of these systems to malicious actors in cyberspace is greater than in the past, because these systems are more often connected to the Internet,” Purdy said in an interview with SecurityFocus.

Because SCADA and other types of control systems regulate real world activity, such as the amount of water flowing though a dam or the electricity flowing through a transformer, their lack of security has worried experts for some time. Yet, in the past few years, attacks by external sources, such as online attackers, have jumped to 70 percent of incidents involving SCADA systems, up from 31 percent of incidents recorded between 1980 and 2001, according to a paper published by the British Columbia Institute of Technology. Sources interviewed for this article maintained that there have been SCADA system attacks, but such incidents are almost never made public. And U.S. authorities investigated online reconnaissance of U.S. critical infrastructure systems by attackers thought to be linked to al Qaeda in Pakistan, Saudia Arabia and Indonesia. However, other breaches have happened and the industry has paid the price for secrecy, said Lori Dustin, vice president of marketing and services for control system maker Verano.

Nearly 1,700 of the 3,200 power utilities have some sort of SCADA system in place, according to a recent survey by industry researcher Newton-Evans. The older networks of control systems have not adapted well to the needs of a deregulated power industry, Samuel Varnado, director of the Information Operations Center at Sandia National Labs stated in written testimony to the Congressional subcommittee. Sandia has demonstrated a way to use SCADA system vulnerabilities to turn out the lights in most major cities, Varnado told the subcommittee last week.

In 2006, the DHS plans on releasing a document outlining the best practices for control-system operators through the Cybersecurity Protection Framework.

http://www.securityfocus.com/news/11351

“Certainly, the criminal behavior that happens today is the greatest risk,” said Jonathan Zar, senior director at SonicWall Inc. and chairman for outreach at VOIPSA, which has more than 100 members from the hardware, software and telephone carrier businesses.

In an initiative reminiscent of the industry’s lobbying campaign leading up to the ineffectual CAN-SPAM Act of 2003, VOIPSA is trying to direct policy-makers’ attention away from the technologies that enable new headaches for users and turn the spotlight on human behavior. The distinction between the human action behind threats to VOIP and their technical means is meant to dissuade policy-makers from imposing technology-related rules that could hinder growth and innovation in the industry.

“There is a policy and regulatory effort under way, and a number of us have been concerned that that was not informed,” said Zar in Sunnyvale, Calif. “We want it to be secure, but we don’t want it to be as secure as East Germany was under the Stasi.”

In addition to the vulnerabilities inherited from data networking, a number of VOIP-specific threats confront calls carried over IP. Privacy advocates, who widely rate Congress’ action to reduce e-mail spam as ineffective, argue that more needs to be done to protect consumers. “What often is missed with social irritants like spam and telemarketing is that they are a product of privacy violations,” said Chris Hoofnagle, director and senior counsel at the Electronic Privacy Information Center, in Washington.

Lessons learned from the ongoing problem of e-mail spam likely will help the industry reduce the risks to VOIP, said Ray Everett-Church, chief privacy officer and senior consultant at Philadelphia-based ePrivacy Group. “With the current deployment of VOIP systems, you’re not seeing nearly the risk of spam that you saw very quickly with the rise and popularity of e-mail,” Everett-Church said.

http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,1876547,00.asp