In 2019, almost a decade after the famed Stuxnet worm silently wreaked havoc on an Iranian uranium enrichment plant, SCADA vendors still have gaping holes in their PLC and HMI development environments. Our new research into 7 different PLC vendor software systems details an almost negligent lack of security standards in modern SCADA environments. We will show a theoretical attack that could have happened using our recently discovered vulnerabilities and proof of concept code to disrupt a major power industrial system. We share our observations on vulnerabilities found in vendors across the board and mitigation techniques for using these required software in highly critical environments where even air-gapping is not enough to remove the threat of a remote attacker.
Before joining Tenable in 2014, Joseph worked at Symantec doing malware reverse engineering. Since joining Tenable as a reverse engineer, Joseph has produced several publications on malware, exploitation and reverse engineering.