CRIME Slammer worm crashed Ohio nuke plant network

From: Andrew Plato (aplato@private)
Date: Thu Sep 11 2003 - 15:48:04 PDT

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    This isn't new news, but a few customers had mentioned this story to me,
    so I thought I'd post it. 
    
    (Full article: http://www.securityfocus.com/news/6767 )
    
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    The Slammer worm penetrated a private computer network at Ohio's
    Davis-Besse nuclear power plant in January and disabled a safety
    monitoring system for nearly five hours, despite a belief by plant
    personnel that the network was protected by a firewall, SecurityFocus
    has learned. 
    
    ...
    
    The Slammer worm entered the Davis-Besse plant through a circuitous
    route. It began by penetrating the unsecured network of an unnamed
    Davis-Besse contractor, then squirmed through a T1 line bridging that
    network and Davis-Besse's corporate network. The T1 line, investigators
    later found, was one of multiple ingresses into Davis-Besse's business
    network that completely bypassed the plant's firewall, which was
    programmed to block the port Slammer used to spread. 
    
    "This is in essence a backdoor from the Internet to the Corporate
    internal network that was not monitored by Corporate personnel," reads
    the April NRC filing by FirstEnergy's Dale Wuokko. "[S]ome people in
    Corporate's Network Services department were aware of this T1 connection
    and some were not."
    
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    Aren't all these places supposed to have regular security audits? Why
    weren't these issues noticed? I guess the security auditors were too
    busy proactively leveraging their best of breed synergies selling
    NutronNipWackNatBlackTwique or some other Box-0-Security device?  
    
    ___________________________________
    Andrew Plato, CISSP
    President/Principal Consultant
    Anitian Enterprise Security 
     
    503-644-5656 Office
    503-644-8574 Fax
    503-201-0821 Mobile
    www.anitian.com
    ___________________________________
    



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