[cartan]

I don’t know who did this, but it definitely wasn’t some stupid script kiddie, nor a college student, nor some loner working on it in his spare time. Cyber warfare is real, and getting more and more dangerous.

[ShadowAce]

[BelegStrongbow]

The punning opportunities here are...rife.

[glorgau]

First things first... don’t use default passwords.

[Mr. Quarterpanel]

Actually, this is a really smart move.

Siemens controllers are used in air conditioners and facility controllers, as well as Generators in power plants.

You could really clobber infrastructure by knocking power plants offline, locking buildings so access would not be possible, and shutting down Air conditioners in data centers.

Any guesses as to what Nation would want to use such a system?

Anyone?

[HereInTheHeartland]

“I don’t know who did this, but it definitely wasn’t some stupid script kiddie, nor a college student, nor some loner working on it in his spare time. Cyber warfare is real, and getting more and more dangerous. “

I would say a very large nation whose name starts with C; would be a good guess.

[truthandlife]

There is a lot of weird stuff going on. Citi Bank had huge problems this week and there has been other stuff.

[SaveTheChief]

Here’s the lesson that should be learned - Don’t connect a sensitive industrial control system to the Internet.

[Still Thinking]

OK. Where to start. First of all WinCC and PCS7 are NOT PLC's. They're software that runs on PC's that compete with real PLC's, and pretty much any decent industrial controls engineer would shun putting control of a critical system on a PC, either for this reason, because of the low reliability of PC's relative to PLC's, or because PC spare parts aren't around in 15-20 years like PLC parts.

Second, I'm not at all convinced you COULD write a virus that would infect a PLC. Their memory architecture, both from a hardware standpoint and the functional allocation of it would mitigate against it.

Thirdly, there would be little reason to even try unless it's an inside job, because the installations are all different. No one outside the project has any way of knowing that Q56.7 (Siemens speak for an output connected to some actuator) is the shear cylinder valve output.

So in short, the story here is that people used hardware and software viewed by the experienced, sensible, and cautious sector of their community as too vulnerable and unreliable for management of critical processes, and ended up getting burned. That's newsworthy?

Real PLC

Virtual PLC (it's virtually as good!)