Energy utilities targeted by Office-spawned recon attack tool Malware writers are targeting international energy utilities with a new trojan that creates beachheads to enable subsequent more advanced attacks. Symantec security boffin Christian Tripputi says the campaign, detected in the first two months of 2015, has a particular focus on creating beachheads on petroleum and gas utilities …
"Utilities can be more hamstrung than other sectors in applying patches. Updating operating systems can have significant impacts on industrial control systems, potentially breaking them."
Pray tell, why would you have a pc that runs the key infrastructure running office apps and email as well.
Oh yeah, it's saved a few quid.
Standard dumb reasons:
Corporate specification PCs strike again?
Of course those Office licenses are free aren't they? The PC came with them anyway.
And on the other hand, "We paid good money for office 97 and 2000, we cannot just throw that out can we?"
I know someone in the power business who has only stopped using Office 97 in the past 6 months - after 3 years of pressure from others and his complaints about an unstable PC!
Yes people like that do exist to cause problems!
I do have to wonder if any of the upper management in some of these companies have heard of security, or is it just a meaningless word to them.
Any one that runs the office and industrial process control on the same network should be taken out the back and put out of their misery.
On the two systems we manage the only point of contact between the front office and the manufacturing section is a networked laser printer that sits in the office and gets input from manufacturing and prints our daily production figures. It is locked to the manufacturing network by mac address as well as being on a different subnet to the office. In one company some idiot thought he could get direct access to manufacturing by using the printer network cable. All he got was fired - we had thought of that and set access alarms.
The big question is, why if small companies can do this type of security why can't large ones? It is not difficult but it does require thought which seems to be sadly lacking in senior management today.
Thumbs up for this alone:
In one company some idiot thought he could get direct access to manufacturing by using the printer network cable. All he got was fired
In too many places that behavior would be excused. Glad you had both the alarms and the backing to do the right thing.
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