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Abstract

Over the last year, synchronized and coordinated attacks against critical infrastructure have taken center stage. Remote cyber intrusions at three Ukrainian regional electric power distribution companies in December 2015 left approximately 225,000 customers without power. Malware, like BlackEnergy, is being specially developed to target supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) systems. Specifically, adversaries are focusing their efforts on obtaining access to the human-machine interface (HMI) solutions that act as the main hub for managing the operation of the control system. Vulnerabilities in these SCADA HMI solutions are, and will continue to be, highly valuable as we usher in this new era of software exploitation. This talk covers an in-depth analysis performed on a corpus of 200+ confirmed SCADA HMI vulnerabilities. It details out the popular vulnerability types discovered in HMI solutions developed by the biggest SCADA vendors, including Schneider Electric, Siemens, General Electric, and Advantech. It studies the weaknesses in the technologies used to develop HMI solutions and describes how critical vulnerabilities manifest in the underlying code. The talk will compare the time-to-patch performance of various SCADA vendors along with a comparison of the SCADA industry to the rest of the software industry. Finally, using the data presented, additional guidance will be provided to SCADA researchers along with a prediction on what we expect next in attacks that leverage SCADA HMI vulnerabilities.