Since the twenty-first-century technology has become a huge staple within our culture, society, and infrastructure. There are many important systems that help run our world’s advanced world and they are used in everyday items. This can consist of Traffic lights, nuclear power plants, and electricity plants. The failure of these systems has a very high risk tied to them and they are a prime target for cyber attacks. If one of these major infrastructures were to go down it would most likely turn out to be a serious chain of devastating events that could cause serious physical and technical damage to our society.

SCADA systems are used mostly for alarms and security for critical infrastructure systems. SCADA refers to the industrial control systems, or the “ICS”. This is the main control for critical infrastructure processes in order to reduce the likelihood of a failure of an important system. There are many subsystems used in an ICS in order to keep everything in line. One of the subsystems is the Human Interface, or the HMI, which is a key system for someone to visually see the state of a system and all of its data in the system that has been collected. They also use this interface to control, the system and override tasks if necessary. When they have a physical component, in most cases a human, it allows for the human to input their own thoughts and makes critical decisions alongside the technology. Other important systems are PLCs and RTUs. RTU means the “Remote Terminal Unit” which directly connects to the sensors of the process. This helps convert the signals to digital data and then it would be sent to the supervisory stream or the HMI. PLCs on the other hand stands for “Programmable logic controller” which are used primarily as field devices. A big section of the systems controls are automatically performed by the RTUs or by the PLCs. Having this done by the RTUs and the PLCs allows for a more consistent, and precise day-to-day operation. A supervisory system or station is the software and is a key component for the servers communicating with the field equipment and in the process of transferring to the HMI. Some SCADA systems require the hardware to be ruggedized which allows the system to withstand temperature fluctuations, voltage shocks, shortages, vibration extremes, and overall increases the reliability of the system. The harmony of the HMI, RTU, and PLC is what makes the core of the security in a critical system a potential attack on a country’s critical infrastructure systems.