Control Systems Under Attack

The enormous growth of the Internet during the last decade offers new means to share and distribute both information and data. In Industry, this results in a rapprochement of the production facilities, i.e. their Process Control and Automation Systems, and the data warehouses. At CERN, the Internet opens the possibility to monitor and even control (parts of) the LHC and its four experiments remotely from anywhere in the world. However, the adoption of standard IT technologies to Distributed Process Control and Automation Systems exposes inherent vulnerabilities to the world. The Teststand On Control System Security at CERN (TOCSSiC) is dedicated to explore the vulnerabilities of arbitrary Commercial-Of-The-Shelf hardware devices connected to standard Ethernet. As such, TOCSSiC should discover their vulnerabilities, point out areas of lack of security, and address areas of improvement which can then be confidentially communicated to manufacturers. This paper points out risks of accessing the Control and Automation Systems in an unprotected manner over the standard Ethernet, presents the TOCSSiC and its findings, and finally discusses methods for protective measures