The latest post-Stuxnet discovery of advanced threats is a malicious malware known as Shamoon. Like Stuxnet, Duqu and Flame, it targeted energy companies in the Middle East, this time Saudi Aramco and likely other oil and gas concerns in the region including Qatar’s RasGaz. It is a new species however, because it did not disrupt an industrial process as Stuxnet did, nor did it stealthily steal business information as Flame and Duqu did. Instead it removed and overwrote the information on the hard drives of 30,000 (yes that number is correct¹) workstations of Saudi Aramco (and who knows how many more at other firms).

To understand the problems faced by SCADA users, the team at Regency IT Consulting wanted to build a basic test rig. The goal with the rig was to help us understand the users’ challenges and to interact with the technology and protocols.

Recently I saw a posting on LinkedIn asking “What’s the difference between a SCADA system and an ICS system, and if there is no difference, then why do we have two different names?”

Honeywell and the ISA Security Compliance Institute last week announced that two more Honeywell products, the Experion® C300 DCS controller and the Experion fieldbus interface module (FIM) joined the Honeywell Safety Manager in achieving its pioneering ISASecure Level 1 certification. Following this announcement Dale Peterson questioned the value of some aspects of ISASecure certification.

Over the past month, I have received a number of emails and seen a number of LinkedIn articles suggesting that I was attacking the concept of data diodes when I stated that Air Gaps are a myth. Unfortunately, this is a serious misunderstanding of my message to the ICS/SCADA community.