June ICS/SCADA Cybersecurity Symposium to address real control system cyber incidents

In preparation for the June 3-4 ICS/SCADA Cybersecurity Symposium in Chicago, I continue to be aware of control system cyber incidents. There were no discussions of control system cyber incidents at RSA, though there were many discussions of network-related cyber events.

I was recently contacted by someone trying to find public OT (control system) cyber incidents leading to physical impacts because public data in ICS-STRIVE and other incident databases don’t address these. Over the past several months, I found control system cyber incidents that have caused significant physical impacts in water, food processing, maritime, rail, automotive, aircraft, data centers and electric power. Very few were identified as being cyber-related as most were considered to be glitches.

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As an example, a city had their water system compromised when the SCADA system erroneously manipulated a valve resulting in flooding parts of the city. This was a control system cyber incident, but it is not clear if the incident was an “unintentional glitch” or a hack like the Muleshoe, Texas water system hack by Russia as the impacts were quite similar. I will be discussing some of these cases in the session on physics-based cyberattacks.