HMI

Antivirus Players Vying for Industrial Control Systems Business

In-brief: news from incumbent endpoint protection firms Symantec and Kaspersky Lab that they are ramping up efforts to sell their wares into industrial control systems environments suggests that the death of anti virus may have been greatly exaggerated. 

an image of a metal tower of Power Lines

Malware Campaign Against Industrial Systems Almost 3 Years Old

The U.S. Government’s Industrial Control System CERT (ICS-CERT) said on Thursday that a campaign targeting industrial control system (ICS) software began in January, 2012 and targeted industrial systems that were directly connected to the public Internet. ICS-CERT said in an alert published on Wednesday that “HMI” (or Human-Machine Interfaces) products from vendors including GE, Advantech/Broadwin and Siemens may have been infected with variants of the BlackEnergy malware since January, 2012. Infected firms were running versions of the GE’s Cimplicity, Advantech/Broadwin’s WebAccess or Siemens’ WinCC with what ICS-CERT called a “direct Internet connection.” In some cases, as with the GE Cimplicity attacks, hackers exploited a known vulnerability in the Cimplicity software to gain access. In others (as with WebAccess and WinCC) the method by which the software was compromised isn’t known, ICS-CERT said. CERT said it hasn’t documented any cases of control processes being modified by the malware. However, BlackEnergy is typically used […]