Industrial Machine control drives vunerable to hacker attack

[george uk]

I mentioned this in a post a few months ago..

http://thehackernews.com/2014/06/stuxnet-like-havex-malware-strikes.html

If anyones running industrial control equipment ( like semiens, bosh ect ). nows the time to make the the decision to unplug from internet access, separate from your internal network. consider one of the modules of the origional stunex was to mess with pulse timings for drives and vfds

[JAZZCNC]

It's never a good idea to have any Machine connected to the Internet IMO. I don't even connect mine to network hub even thou control is connected thru ethernet.

[magicniner]

Sound advice but akin to "Don't wet your fingers and stick them in a live mains socket"
Those who really need the advice will either not read it or ignore it ;-)

- Nick

[george uk]

Those who really need the advice will either not read it or ignore it ;-)

100% agree, it really would shock most people if they did an audit of there connected devices and realised how assessable things are.

but its quite serious news for anyone with a Siemens controller... I dont know how you would notice this infection apart from resuming your motor timings from your VDF to see if there correct. ( thats what stux did, hacked directly the Siemens controller function that deals with the pulses ). It was designed to damage the motors in centrifuges.

If anyone spots a cheep one, i might purchase one just to see if its possible to test it for infection. Cutting wood, you probebly would not notice ( apart from hotter spinle ). But operations like threading, or multi axis, you would notice.