Illinois Water SCADA Incident: DHS was right -- and so was I!

Caveat: The information on the Illinois Water system cyber intrusion is directly from the Illinois Statewide Terrorism and Intelligence Center. In fact, the title of the document is "Public Water District Cyber Intrusion". I have simply provided their explanation.

DHS's statement on the Illinois water SCADA Intrusion is: "After detailed analysis of all available data, ICS-CERT and the FBI found no evidence of a cyber intrusion into the SCADA system of the Curran-Gardner Public Water District in Springfield, Illinois." Conversely, DHS and the FBI found no evidence a cyber intrusion did not occur.

Currently, there is a lack of CONTROL SYSTEM cyber security forensics and logging.  DHS needs to mandate the implementation of appropriate control system cyber forensics and logging or the Curran-Garner scenario will continue to be repeated. Until that time, it really is an engineering exercise to understand why control systems and plant equipment operate or fail in unexpected ways.

Joe Weiss