US Power Plants Are Easy to Hack

According to researchers, there are two dozen security holes that can be used to crash or seize control of facilities’ servers. Power plants across the United States and Canada could overheat, shut down or be caused to malfunction due to security vulnerabilities.

The researchers have found 25 zero-day vulnerabilities in the protocol by which power plants communicate internally. Normally, the security experts don’t take a look at such protocols because they are isolated from the web. Moreover, the specificity of the protocols means they should have a kind of security through obscurity: if not many people know how they work, then nobody is supposed to know how to exploit them.

However, the researchers warn that this is a false comfort. In case somebody tries to breach the control center through the worldwide web, they have to bypass layers of firewalls. However, the hackers could go out to a remote substation with very little physical security and get on the network and take out hundreds of substations potentially. In the meanwhile, they don’t necessarily have to get into the substation either.

So far, the researchers have reported 9 of the potential exploits to the vendor who designed each one, and to the US Department of Homeland Security. They pointed out that most of the flaws allow potential intruders to send controlling servers into infinite loops, thus rendering them unable to respond to commands from controllers. Although it is not like rendering them unable to control the utilities, it could still mean that the operators in charge of sections of the power grid cannot see conditions on the ground.

The industry observers admit that the worst of the security flaws exposed so far enables a potential buffer-overflow attack, whereby code which is stored for one purpose can “overflow” its container, and finally be executed when it shouldn’t be. The security researchers warn that at its most serious, this flaw allows for code to be injected into servers, which could allow hackers to take over the whole system. Maybe this is where US authorities should put their efforts, instead of pursuing file-sharers all over the world.