10K Reasons to Worry About Critical Infrastructure
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/01/10000-control-systems-online/
Whether our nation will be plunged into the stone age at the behest of a nation state, terrorists or bored hackers, it is simply a matter of time before it happens. Granted we don’t know how many of these detected systems are important, but I feel quite sure that even if it is a small percentage, the number of systems is huge. The main thing we got going for us is the shear size of our country and the vast number of systems with little or no interconnection, meaning there are a whole lot of systems that need to be hacked. Having said that, I suspect that there are a rather limited number of actual independent control systems and once you have hacked one, you have hacked 30% or more of the rest of the system. Also, we are talking about basically a random scan of the ‘net, one would presume that nation states would be focused and targeted and indeed would utilize social engineering and even ‘boring old’ espionage to accomplish their goals.
Things are going to get really interesting at some point and the more heated the US diplomatic rhetoric gets the more likely someone is going to flip the big red switch and we will all get to experience life in the stone age for at least weeks, likely months, presuming, of course, we have enough remaining economic organization to even rebuild the systems.
