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Thousands of critical energy and water systems exposed online for anyone to exploit

November 1, 2018

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While you likely don’t stop to think about water or energy industries when you grab a drink of water or flip on the lights, you would definitely notice if your electricity or water stopped working. You might not know why they stopped working at first, but since critical infrastructure is connected online, then it’s not outside the realm of possibility that hackers remotely caused the outage. In fact, researchers found human machine interface (HMI) systems in thousands of critical water and energy organizations exposed to the internet and just waiting to be exploited; critical functions such as starting or stopping a system can be accessed by anyone, be it nation-state attackers or script kiddies.

Based on the 200 percent increase of SCADA-related vulnerabilities published by Trend Micro’s Zero Day Initiative so far this year, there seems to be an increased interest in exploiting critical infrastructure which has been connected to the internet.

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