SCADA Vulnerabilities in Industrial Control Systems
May 18, 2011
Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) systems are cornerstones of modern industrial society. SCADA systems enable humans to control, monitor and automate activities of connected physical systems, such as oil and gas pipeline valves, temperature monitoring and cooling systems, energy grids, traffic lights, etc, Programmable Logic Controllers (PLCs) are the purpose-built devices that communicate with and control the physical devices. For example, they enable human operators to define rules that automatically turn on water cooling pumps to a nuclear reactor when the temperature reaches a predefined threshold. They are in use in every country and in every industrial control system, and impact our lives every day in ways we might not realize.
