Late last fall, Detective Chris Hsiung of the Mountain View, Calif., police department began investigating a suspicious pattern of surveillance against Silicon Valley computers. From the Middle East and South Asia, unknown browsers were exploring the digital systems used to manage Bay Area utilities and government offices. Hsiung, a specialist in high-technology crime, alerted the FBI's San Francisco computer intrusion squad.
Working with experts at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, the FBI traced trails of a broader reconnaissance. A forensic summary of the investigation, prepared in the Defense Department, said the bureau found "multiple casings of sites" nationwide. Routed through telecommunications switches in Saudi Arabia, Indonesia and Pakistan, the visitors studied emergency telephone systems, electrical generation and transmission, water storage and distribution, nuclear power plants and gas facilities.
Some of the probes suggested planning for a conventional attack, U.S. officials said. But others homed in on a class of digital devices that allow remote control of services such as fire dispatch and of equipment such as pipelines. More information about those devices -- and how to program them -- turned up on al Qaeda computers seized this year, according to law enforcement and national security officials.
I used to work with Joe Weiss at EPRI. Good to see my old colleague getting some press.
We don’t need a EMP or solar event to reduce us to the middle ages.
I have been arguing for years that the Windows monopoly is a monoculture. It will suffer the same fate as the Dutch tulip market crash, the Irish potato(e) famine, the boll weevil infestation and other monocultures over history.
If 95% of our computers are controlled by one family of operating systems, some day there will be a worldwide infection that has the potential to wipe them out.
The only answer is Diversity. I know this is a bad word with so-called Conservatives, but heterogeneity in computers is a necessary thing in a modern, wired, connected world economy.
Think about it: if all your connected computers run Windows, there is a 100% chance that a Windows infection on one of them will spread to another.
But say you have four Operating Systems in your institution; 1/4 Windows, 1/4Mac, 1/4 Linux, 1/4 some other obscure OS. If one system gets infected, the chances of the next is 1/4. The chances of ALL your systems getting the infection is (1/4)**N where N is the number of systems in your entire institution.
But as with all visionary concepts, this will be ignored until the disaster strikes. Then everyone will ask: “Why didn’t we take precautions?”
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I was just reading about something similar:
The Farewell Dossier (How the CIA blew up the Trans-Siberian pipeline with pirated software)
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2594959/posts
This is the danger when you hire the lowest cost person in a third world country to program your systems. I am beginning to believe that these unknown exploits in Microsoft code are deliberately put there.
It is infecting Siemens Step 7 PLC programming? That’s the only thing that I know of that they use in industrial operations.
So I guess the $64,000 question is one of who has developed software to check for and purge the worm from individual systems, and where can that be obtained?
Rename the main Siemens files so the bad program won’t know that is the program running.
Won’t then recognize the program it was supposed to attack.
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