The Hacker News - Cybersecurity News and Analysis: SCADA Hacking

Israel is considered one of the most advanced country in cyber security, but at the same time is a privileged target for hostile governments intent in sabotage and cyber espionage on his technology. Yesterday, Cybersecurity experts revealed that a major artery in Israel's national road network located in the northern the city of Haifa suffered a cyber attack, that caused massive traffic congestion in the City. Isreal military officials are aware of cyber threats that could hit the infrastructure of the country and they afraid the possible effect of a cyber attack on a large scale. Israeli government websites suffer thousands of cyberattacks each day according Ofir Ben Avi, head of the government's website division. The Israel Electric Corp. confirmed that its servers register about 6,000 unique computer attacks every second. In June, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu stated that Iran militia, Hezbollah and Hamas have targeted in numerous occasions Israel

It's not a mystery, every nation is worried of the level of security of its infrastructure, the United States are among the most concerned governments due the high number of cyber-attack against its networks. US Government representative such us former States Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta and Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano warned in more than one occasion on the possible consequences of a cyber offensive and declared the necessity to improve the cyber capabilities of the country.  Senators are interested to evaluate the level of protection of nuclear stockpile of foreign governments against cyber attacks, question has been raised after that Pentagon's chief cyber officer admitted to ignore if countries such as Russia or China have adopted efficient countermeasures. Nelson and Armed Services Committee Chairman Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich. will request to national intelligence an assessment about the ability of foreign states to safeguard networked

Stuxnet case is considered by security expert the first concrete act of cyber warfare, a malware specifically designed to hit SCADA systems inside nuclear plants in Iran. The event has alerted the international security community on the risks related to the effects of a cyber attack against supervisory control and data acquisition in industrial environment.  SCADA systems are adopted practically in every industrial control system (ICS) used for the control and monitor of industrial processes that are potential targets of a cyber attack such as a critical infrastructures or a utility facilities. Manufacturing, production, power generation, water treatment facilities, electrical power transmission and distribution and large communication systems are all considered critical asset for every countries and represent privileged targets for cyber attacks. Obtain access to SCADA systems is fundamental step for a attackers that desires to compromise the controlled processes and contrary to

Reid Wightman from security firm ioActive reported that there is an undocumented backdoor available in   CoDeSys  software that actually used to manage equipment in power plants, military environments, and nautical ships. The bug allow malicious hackers to access sensitive systems without authorization, Ars said. The CoDeSys tool will grant a command shell to anyone who knows the proper command syntax and inner workings, leaving systems that are connected to the public Internet open to malicious tampering and There is absolutely no authentication needed to perform this privileged command,  Reid mention. This software has been used in industrial control systems sold by 261 different manufacturers. 3S-Smart Software Solutions designs CoDeSys and recently issued an advisory that recommends users set a password, but  he is able to develop two exploit shells , one is  codesys-shell.py (to get the CoDeSys command shell without authentication) and other , codesys-transfer.py (read or w

Eugene Kaspersky is working with his engineers at Russian security firm Kaspersky Lab to create a secure-by-design OS for ICS. In an interview Kaspersky said " It's true no one else ever tried to make a secure operating system. This may sound weird because of the many efforts Microsoft, Apple and the open source community have made to make their platforms as secure as possible. With all respect, we should admit they were developing a universal solution for a wide range of application and various kinds of users. And security and usability is always a matter of compromise! With a universal OS a developer inevitably sacrifices security for usability ." Companies that maintain ICS are forced to try to patch them on the fly in the event of a malware attack, a process usually easier said than done. Instead, Kaspersky suggests that the solution lies in a secure operating system, one in which ICS can be installed. Such an OS could help ensure that industrial systems stay healthy

ICS-CERT - Industrial Control Systems Cyber Emergency Response Team has released the Advisory titled ICS-ALERT-12-284-01 - Sinapsi eSolar Light Multiple Vulnerabilities . They Report about report multiple vulnerabilities with proof-of-concept (PoC) exploit code that affecting the Sinapsi eSolar Light Photovoltaic System Monitor which is a supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) monitoring product. The US Department of Homeland Security is warning about vulnerabilities in a common SCADA (supervisory control and data acquisition) package that is used to remotely monitor and manage solar energy-generating power plants. The eSolar Light Photovoltaic System Monitor is a SCADA product that allows solar power stations to simultaneously monitor different components of photovoltaic arrays, such as photovoltaic inverters, energy meters, gauges The disclosure was made by Roberto Paleari and Ivan Speziale, who described the vulnerable system as being the Schneider Electric