Omni Special about hackers attacking PLC's

[Ken Roach]

I read the Jeep remote exploit story with interest and it really tells you a lot about the white hat guys that they put a journalist into a hacked car and told him "don't worry, we won't do anything dangerous, we're just going to illustrate the exploit to you".

And then they locked up his brakes on the highway.

 

[ceilingwalker]

In that same PBS special, hackers were able to infiltrate home security systems. They were able to pick a protected
home, find its GPS coordinates, drive to the home, hack the security system, and walk in through the unlocked door.

Yes, that's what I saw. Using the example of the oil field I visited. It is unmanned, all of the actions of opening and closing valves, when to release water from the system (I think it was water), etc....... is all performed, hundreds of miles away. It had a Siemens PLC, if my memory serves me right. I thought to myself at the time, "how boring, no one would want to hack into this system, there is nothing to be gained". After finishing up the project that involved chemical vapor deposition, using HCL, HF, and Hydrogen gases, is when I started wondering "what if?". Not knowing much about the HF and HCL gases I asked our delivery service about the dangers of it. He told me that one of those cylinders leaking all of its gas into the plant, was enough to kill everything inside that plant. Now, I don't know if he was exaggerating but I did huff a little HF when I had to go to an accident investigation and the O2 sensor was reading normal and the HF gas sniffer was reading 0, and the small amount I huffed, took away my breath. It reminded me of chemical warfare training in the military. Putting all this together started making me wonder if systems that dangerous should even put on something more than a local network. Where I work at now we have thumb-drives that are issued to us. If I try to insert any thumb-drive other than what I was issued, the network won't even open it. If I try to put this thumb-drive on anything other than the network, it won't allow me to save anything to it. Thank you everyone for you input and ideas here. That video you linked to this thread Ron, very eye opening. How can one be "paranoid" when it is happening here and now? That to me is common sense, the danger level with this.