Era of Insecure Industrial Control Systems and Calamities to Come
Ashkan Sami, Abdullah, Khalili, Ali Davanian, Mahdi Azimi
Journal of Electronic Systems, Vol. 3, No. 4, 2013.
DOI: 
Link: http://www.dline.info/jes/fulltext/v3n4/3.pdf
Abstract:
Industrial control systems (ICS) control almost all the vital processes and industries that have direct effects on our lives. Recent information security breaches found in these systems have led to proliferation of attacks that can endanger not only the company they were deployed in but the people and environment around it. Stuxnet worm was a â€˜successfulâ€™ story. Recently, it is shown that even regular attackers without sophisticated tools, like Stuxnet, can take control of ICS and create disasters. Even though vast amount of effort has put into securing ICS, this paper aims to illustrate that based on reported and experimentally obtained vulnerabilities on all aspects of ICS, no short term solution to protect ICS exists. This makes all ICSs vulnerable to at least one or more forms of attacks especially when network access is possible. Having insecure ICS will lead to dare consequences that will affect every one of us irrespective of color, nationality and religion. Since attack scenarios to ICS and code segments of malwares such as Stuxnet can be found on Internet, attacking ICS can be orchestrated with little effort from anywhere. Unfortunately, these forms of cyber attacks cannot be traced easily. The proven governmental investments to exploit these security breaches as untraceable weapons will lead the whole world into a very dark future. Last but not least, ICS with security considerations must be reinvented from the ground up and no patch can fix the problems if they not worsen it.