[ Thanks to Joe Barr
for this link. ]
“North America’s power grid, creaking under loads it was never
designed to handle, may be facing an even grimmer future thanks to
security flaws in aging control systems that are increasingly
interconnected with Microsoft-based enterprise systems. The
situation is so bad, experts say, that bored script kiddies could
soon be knocking out power stations as easily as they concoct
viruses from toolkits available on the Web.“Brian Ahern, CEO of control system security firm Verano, says
that three issues have created a security nightmare for the power
grid: underinvestment in electric power distribution systems that
include control software; the interconnection of power industry
business systems with legacy control systems; and a trend among
vendors to build control-system technology on insecure platforms
such as Microsoft’s…”