Critical Infrastructure Risks and Vulnerability
Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) consists of control systems deployed to monitor and offer surveillance of critical equipment with manufacturing or industrial sites. Such industrial components are the critical infrastructures whose collapse due to interferences is adverse to entire sectors of the economy. Examples of such infrastructures include telecommunications, water, transport, gas and waste control. The SCADA systems collect and interpret instant information for monitoring and control of the systems. The processed data is then continuously reviewed by the administrators
SCADA systems in the USA are prone to threats by outsiders from different locations around the globe (Igure, Laughter & Williams, 2006). SCADA systems such as the telecommunication systems in the country could be prone to malfunction occasioned by communication signals outside the country. Such interferences could interfere with the communication patterns or could even lead to an utter collapse of a system or a set of systems.
Malware on computer operating systems such as Windows could be directed from any location in the world to create vulnerability of the SCADA systems (Zhu, Joseph & Sastry, 2011). Such an incidence occurs due to the collision of operating systems that are similar in nature to compound the vulnerability of the scheme. For example, the 2003 power blackout in the USA and Canada was occasioned by window systems malware, which originated from outside the two countries. Ironically, the security experts were not even aware of the existence of such a threat.
SCADA software is a subject of cyber attack by outsiders in whom the codes are manipulated and hence altered to suit the intentions of the criminals in collaboration with others within the USA. The new system is then transported into the country and presented to the intended user. The dangerous part of such cyber activities is that only the designer and the recipient are aware of the planned sabotage of the systems.
References
Igure, V. M., Laughter, S. A., & Williams, R. D. (2006). Security issues in SCADA networks. Computers & Security, 25(7), 498-506.
Zhu, B., Joseph, A., & Sastry, S. (2011). A taxonomy of cyber attacks on SCADA systems. In Internet of things (iThings/CPSCom), 2011 international conference on and 4th international conference on cyber, physical and social computing (pp. 380-388). IEEE.
