Siemens, the company that makes the SCADA systems that run much of the world’s industrial infrastructure, acknowledged vulnerabilities in the systems and promised to fix them.
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security issued an advisory that warned of the vulnerability, urging Siemens customers to minimize exposure of industrial control systems to the Internet to make them less vulnerable to attack.
We told you about the hack of a Texas water plant last month, which was allegedly carried out to showcase just such a vulnerability. The real problem is that SCADA systems are old. They were built as stand-alone networks, not meant to be connected to the web; therefore, they never had to worry about outsiders breaking in.
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