Infrastructure and SCADA
Infrastructure
A vulnerability can be described as “a weakness which can be exploited by a cyber attack to gain unauthorized access to or perform unauthorized actions on a computer system”(Tunggal 2020).With vulnerabilities within the system, it is able to attack and destroy critical infrastructure systems that could pose a threat to our country. The different types of systems someone could possibly hack into with vulnerabilities is: Industrial processes (power generation), Facility- Based
processes (airports), and Infrastructure processes (gas pipelines)(2020). With getting access to these systems, it can pose a threat to the country’s health, safety, and/or economics. Probably one of the biggest examples of this is September 11, 2001. After this historic phenomenon that showed the vulnerability within a critical infrastructure system. This is where the Supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) comes into play.
Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition
Supervisory control and data acquisition is a system that has hardware and software that grants companies/organizations to control, monitor, gather and process data in real time (2018). When a company implements SCADA it is able to go through these steps and flow of information to weaken the threat. The way everything will flow is that it will first go through the sensory, then actuator, programmer logical controller, remote terminal unit, communication systems, front end processor, and lastly to the SCADA server (Kirkpatrick, 2020). All of these step are important in mitigating the threat but the most important step would be the programmer logical controller and the front end processor. The programmer logical controller is an industrial computer that carefully monitors the input and signal if it finds something that is suspicious while the SCADA server is very important as well. It’s able to login and analyze data that will be stored as a backup, if something bad was to happen.
Conclusion
With implementing Supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) it will be able to help and weaken threats that can happen to an organization/company. This is very big especially on a national level because we need to keep the public health, safety and economy safe and secure.
References
Critical Infrastructure Security: Department of Homeland Security. Retrieved November 08, 2020, from https://www.dhs.gov/topic/critical-infrastructure-security#:~:text=Critical%20infrastructure
%20describes%20the%20physical,or%20public%20health%20or%20safety.
Kirkpatrick, Charles (2020).Engineering, Critical Infrastructure and Cybersecurity. Retrieved November 08, 2020 from https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1lB2dMFBXx2SmUyxwB8YvOWho4s_BCWmyK1bPjAxyUqc/edit#slide=id.p15
The White House (2003, February). The Physical Protection of Critical Infrastructures and Key Assets. Department of Homeland Security. Retrieved November 08, 2020 from https://www.dhs.gov/xlibrary/assets/Physical_Strategy.pdf
Tunggal, A. (2020, October 2).
What is a Vulnerability?: UpGuard. Retrieved November 08, 2020,
from https://www.upguard.com/blog/vulnerability
(2018, September 8).
What is SCADA?. Inductive Automation. Retrieved November 08, 2020,
from https://www.inductiveautomation.com/resources/article/what-is-scada
(2018, October 11).
Advantages offered by our SCADA (Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition System). Nutec Bickley. Retrieved November 08, 2020, from
https://www.nutecbickley.com/blog/advantages-offered-by-our-scada-supervisory-controland-data-acquisition-system