http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/1556944/linux-saves-aussie-electricity By Nick Farrell The Inquirer 1 October 2009 QUICK THINKING open sourcerers might have saved an Australian power supply system after its electrical grid control room network got infected with a virus. A Windows virus hit the networks of Integral Energy and, according to a submission to Slashdot, the virus managed to spread to the operator display consoles in the control room. Quick thinking techies in the control systems department of the utility swapped the infected Windows boxes for machines running Linux that they were using for development. The move prevented the virus from taking over all the operator displays in the control room. There have been a number of government inquiries into the security of electricity companies worldwide because of the fear that hackers, terrorists or cyber warriors for a rival country might take control of electric power grids. Now it would seem that such fears might have been realised. However in Oz there could be some concern that notoriously insecure Windows machines were even being used for critical infrastructure systems. The Slashdot submission says that the power grid's system control and data acquisition (SCADA) servers run Solaris Unix and the operator consoles only really need to run X-windows displays. The question is why the utility would choose to run X on Windows boxes merely to talk to the UNIX-based SCADA servers that control the electrical grid. [...] ________________________________________ Did a friend send you this? From now on, be the first to find out! Subscribe to InfoSec News http://www.infosecnews.orgReceived on Fri Oct 02 2009 - 02:36:05 PDT
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.2.0 : Fri Oct 02 2009 - 02:57:31 PDT