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What Price Security?

Posted March 13, 2011 7:00 AM

For the industrial security industry, Stuxnet — a computer worm that targets industrial control systems - has been a gift: users of programmable controllers have been warned that there may be viruses and worms lurking about on the Internet, and now they have a real case to point to. But just how serious is this threat? Will security concerns and costs impede the spread of factory automation?

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Associate

Join Date: Mar 2011
Posts: 30
#1

Re: What Price Security?

03/14/2011 5:17 AM

Stuxnet was designed for a specific purpose -of course it could be modified but there is no political or financial gain in doing so. Therefore I would say the threat to the majority of us "normal" users is practically non-existent.

Of course there is money to be made by spreading fear and this fear will in turn cause more fear which will eventually cause big corporations to splash the cash - Y2K jumps to mind, exactly how many planes fell out of the sky because of Y2K issues?

I just can't wait to run over to our IT group and get them all worked up because of this - the poor bastards will not be able to sleep for a month ("fortunately" for us our IT group is "in charge" of our automation, see http://cr4.globalspec.com/thread/66669/Control-Systems-IT-OT)

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Guru
Engineering Fields - Instrumentation Engineering - New Member

Join Date: Dec 2009
Location: San Antonio, TX USA
Posts: 844
Good Answers: 29
#2

Re: What Price Security?

03/14/2011 2:24 PM

Forewarned is forearmed, as they say. I'd welcome more reading on this if anyone who chimes in happens to have a link.

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