Central Georgia Section of IEEE November Meeting
We hear the terms Productivity and Do More With Less - and to accomplish this
we have moved from direct observation and control through Telemetry to
something we call SCADA (Supervisory Control And Data Acquisition) - a system
built to monitor and control large and widely dispersed systems we commonly
refer to as our infrastructure: oil and gas production, pipelines, power
generation and transmission, manufacturing, water and waste management and
other large scale systems. But these systems were built and deployed, and in
many cases are still being built and deployed, without a focus on securing
those systems. (What happens when things go dark, there is no gasoline readily
available, you lose comms, or you don't have potable water . or worse potable
and waste water are intermingled) This talk will give an overview of SCADA
tracing its history, look at the threats to and vulnerabilities of these
systems (including some highlights of incidents - 75% of surveyed US
Utility/Energy companies reported suffering one or more security incidents
during a 12 month period), discuss remedies including better monitoring of
system activity and network traffic to alert when anomalies are detected and
the need for better access control. In discussing access control we will give
discuss the use of biometrics as one means of access control.
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