Michael Mimoso

ICS Vulnerabilities Surface as Monitoring Systems Integrate with Digital Backends

Draped across the automobile’s front license plate is a printout, attached like it came off a roll of Scotch Tape. On the printout is a SQL statement; probably the last thing anyone would expect to see as a hood ornament. No one knows where the photograph came from or whether someone was trying to be funny, or legitimately trying to compromise the backend system controlling the traffic camera in the same photo. But one thing is for sure, this clever stunt has helped shed light on the insecurity of control systems.


Disruptions to businesses in South Korea continue today after hackers used wiper malware to take a number of banks and television networks offline yesterday. A number of financial systems at a half-dozen banks and production systems inside South Korea’s major television networks remain down, kicking off speculation as to who is behind the attacks and how they got in.

Information security is littered with bad analogies. And none sounds sillier than a watering hole attack, which plays off the tactic that dominant animals use when stalking food by loitering at a watering hole. Rather than chase their prey, a lion will wait for prey to come to it. Hackers are doing the same thing to a great degree of success. Rather than using a spear phishing email campaign to lure prey to them, hackers are infecting vulnerable sites of a common interest to their targets, and then redirecting them to malware and more badness.

A controversial Internet scanning project has come under fire for illegally accessing and running code on remote machines. The Internet Census 2012 project, revealed Sunday in a post to Seclists.org, discovered 420,000 embedded devices accessible using default credentials. The unnamed researcher behind the project then used the devices as a botnet to scan most of the IPv4 address space.