Nancy Bartels driving the blogging machine here this morning. I am not by nature an alarmist, and I tend to ignore headlines that say (or imply) "OMG, we're all going to die!" On the other hand, when you smell smoke in the kitchen for longer than a couple of minutes, it can't hurt to assume something more than the toast is burning. Which brings us to this link from Dark Reading.

Seems SCADA systems (or at least alleged attacks on them) have hit the big time.Wired magazine is running this story on the Illinois Water Attack.See my post over on Unfettered about what's looking more and more like an Attack by the Keystone Cops instead, wh

Nancy Bartels of Control magazine and ControlGlobal.com hijacking Joe's blog here. This story would be funny if it wasn't so scary. Wired magazine has broken the real story (or the latest iteration of the real story). The link is here. So it wasn't evil hackers from Russia after all. From the sound of it, more like a Keystone Cops fire drill.

My blog on the Illinois water hack was directly based on a formal disclosure announcement by the Illinois State Terrorism and Intelligence Center - STIC (Note: My blog did not identify the state involved. That disclosure came from DHS). The STIC disclosure was made on November 10; my blog was on November 17 after numerous water organizations told me they were unaware of the disclosure.

Per the WaterISAC portal, the WaterISAC (Information Sharing and Analysis Center) is a community of water sector professionals who share a common purpose: to protect public health and the environment. The WaterISAC provides email notifications about threats and any incidents demanding immediate attention. Consequently, one of the driving reasons for writing the blog on the Illinois water system hack Thursday was the WaterISAC had not yet notified the water utilities.

Last week, a disclosure was made about a public water district SCADA system hack. There are a number of very important issues in this disclosure:

IDC is preparing a conference event in Brisbane, Australia March 21-22, 2012 that promises an opportunity to network with your peers and learn more about the latest happenings in this exciting and growing field.

The objective of this forum is to outline the best practice in designing, installing, commissioning and troubleshooting industrial data communications systems.

There is a perception that control systems, including field devices, have cyber forensic capabilities similar to those of IT systems. That perception is wrong. A control system generally has a Microsoft front-end human-machine interface (HMI) that should have adequate cyber forensics. The critical part of control systems are the field devices that automatically measure and control the processes, for example, the controllers that Stuxnet attacked. They generally do not have cyber forensics.

Symantec posted on their site the latest information on the next chapter of Stuxnet. The site says that "Duqu" is a new threat whose goal is to gather intelligence in order to conduct a future Stuxnet-like attack.

Duqu has nearly identical parts to Stuxnet, but it has a completely different purpose. Its purpose is to gather intelligence and assets like design documents that will give the attackers the insights they need to mount a future, highly-targeted attack on organizations such as industrial control facilities.