In this write-up, I will talk about the vulnerabilities that are associated with critical infrastructure systems and the role SCADA applications play in mitigating these risks. So I will talk about what are critical infrastructure systems, which are systems and things like networks and assets that are vital to running your everyday things like water or energy. Now that we know and have an idea of what infrastructure systems are, I will talk about the vulnerabilities that are associated with critical infrastructure. To start of the article Vulnerability “Challenges in the vulnerability and risk analysis of critical infrastructures” talks about how “natural hazards, component aging and failure, sharp load demand increase, climatic changes, intentional attacks” (Zio, 2016), meaning that something simple as an earthquake, floods, or failure of the parts could take down the system. When taking about international attacks, it could be by “hardware, software, and humans” (Zio, 2016), meaning that it is vulnerable to a phishing attack where an attacker can get into the system through the employees or through the software. Some critical infrastructure systems rely on older technology, which could result in a vulnerability. Now that we found and identified the vulnerabilities related to critical infrastructure systems, we can talk about SCADA. To start, I will talk about what is SCADA. What is SCADA? According to SCADA Systems, SCADA is a “system that collects data from various sensors at a factory, plant, or in other remote locations and sends this data to a central computer that then manages and controls the data” (SCADA Systems, 2024). Now that we know this, I can talk about how SCADA can mitigate the vulnerabilities I talked about earlier. The first way of doing this according to SCADA Systems is “To increase the system integrity, multiple servers are occasionally configured in hot-standby or dual-redundant formation, providing monitoring and continuous control during server failures.” (SCADA Systems, 2024) which is important because in the event you have something like a flood where a server goes down, you will still have access to that system from the redundancy they have set in place. The second way is that “SCADA vendors are addressing these risks by developing specialized industrial VPN and firewall solutions for SCADA networks that are based on TCP/IP,” which block access to an attacker if they aren’t near the system, which allows employees to access it remotely safely through a VPN. Overall these are the vulnerabilities associated with critical infrastructure systems, and the role SCADA applications play in mitigating these risks.








References
Zio, E. (2016, March 9). Challenges in the vulnerability and risk analysis of critical infrastructures. Reliability Engineering & System Safety. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0951832016000508?via%3Dihub
SCADA Systems. (2024). SCADA systems. https://www.scadasystems.net/