Scary yes. Surprising? Not at all.
6 Spice ups
Someone get me a Video Toaster for that Commodore so we can do some video editing!
1 Spice up
That’s funny I actually know what that is. Someone gave me this old system that was in some sort of conference room. System had to be from like early 90s had a Pentium CPU, win 95 like 64MB ram. A bunch of ISA capture cards with BNC, sound ports, etc. The system was totally shot BIOS, everything was dead. I tried some troubleshooting got nothing I think one of the cards was some sort of video toaster with BNC plugs. It was all pretty much worthless so I scraped the metal bits and the rest went in the trash.
Video Toaster on an Amiga 2000 with Lightwave 3D. Ah the memories…
It had some pretty cheesy analog transition effects, and I remember seeing at least 1 auto dealers commercial on TV and said yup… that’s video toaster at work there…
1 Spice up
a LOT of scada systems are on XP still.
Generally the costs to upgrade these systems as a whole are insane. That isn’t a good reason not to upgrade but when non-techies are writing the checks… a lot of times it gets pushed back and back.
That bit about the energy industry loosing 9 stations and plunging the us into the middle ages is a little sensationalist… those were key stations. There is a lot more redundancy than that. Not to downplay the state of security in those fields though. Security is a legitimate problem there. Integrators are not the best at thinking like a hacker… couple with the costs… it is a perfect storm waiting to happen.
If enough politicians learn about it then hopefully they will release grants to address it. Too many places nickel and dime it… it is the only way to get major compliance.
2 Spice ups
I thought that too. 9 substations down take out everything!? Is it that poorly setup or are you using wikipedia figures?
I expect you’re right though that’s probably like some sort of huge susbstaions.
If I remember reading it correctly, they were strategic outages and the redundant sites in order of “rollover”. It has been a bit since I read that report though, and it should be kept in mind that this was a high level red team that designed the report as well.
I remember reading a fiction story called One Second After that detailed a more catastrophic way involving low level nuclear detonations in the ionsphere. Author did a lot of research before writing it. Fiction, but good read.
I see you posting a lot of security stuff here lately, you might find this interesting:
It is a NIST publication on security for scada. Also gives a high level overview of the general principals.
1 Spice up
Cyali
(Cyali)
9
Wanna know what’s scarier than that?
US nuclear bases rely on 8" floppies
7 Spice ups
I had an unopened box of 8" floppies until about 4 years ago when a coworker threw them out cleaning up stuff.
johan
(JibbJabb)
11
Aren’t they also responsible for the extended XP support?
Well what do you expect? I can totally comprehend this since countries roads, bridges, etc. are in need of a major overhaul themselves. No one wants to spend the money needed to do so.
3 Spice ups
tnb
(Ty7625)
13
A few 10" floppies were found around here. Never seen that before.
Not surprised, “I works don’t fix it”.
edt
(EdT)
15
We still have some Windows XP machines here – and some Windows 2000 as well. There’s some testing equipment we use that is hard-coded specifically for Win2K and of course nobody is willing to foot the bill to upgrade the equipment.
At least we’re almost done getting rid of the server 2003 stuff…
most ATMs are no longer on XP, they still got security updates from MS until last April, there was a big push for everyone to upgrade to win 7 before this time.
Not at all surprised but it doesn’t fill me with a great deal of confidence. I suppose the advantage is we’ll be safer if the machines decide to rise up against us as important systems won’t have up-to-date operating systems!
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