Wednesday, June 11, 2008

Next Time the Utility Goes Down...

We mentioned earlier that one major electrical blackout was likely a result of hacking.

There could be lots more. And they might be water- or sewer- or natural-gas failures.

Attackers could gain control of water treatment plants, natural gas pipelines and other critical utilities because of a vulnerability in the software that runs some of those facilities, security researchers reported Wednesday

...the vulnerability could have counterparts in other so-called supervisory control and data acquisition, or SCADA, systems.

The attack-method is simple: buffer-overflow.

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