SCADA systems are commonly used today to manage all levels of infrastructure.
SCADA stands for “Supervisory, Control and Data Acquisition.” These systems are also
called “ICS”, or Infrastructure Control Systems. They are used today in all types of modern
infrastructure from Water Treatment and Gas Pipelines all the way up to Airports and
Space Stations. One distinction that must be cleared up to understand these systems are
that SCADA systems coordinate all the processes of the site, rather than directly
controlling each process.

SCADA systems are made up of many parts all coordinating together to maximize
efficiency. Not all variations of SCADA systems have every single process, but enough
systems have many of the following parts that they are all worth mentioning.
At the base level interacting directly with the related infrastructure are
Programmable Logic Units (PLU) and Remote Terminal Units (RTU). These control the
simple systems that are then fed as data to the SCADA system which uses the data to
adjust the system as a whole or provide the data over to a Human Machine Interface (HMI). This interface allows a human controller to be given the data and make adjustments to the overall system as needed.

According to some recent studies, (SCADA vulnerabilities and attacks: A review of
the state‐of‐the‐art and open issues, Computers & Security, Volume 125,2023,103028,ISSN 0167-
4048,https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cose.2022.103028.(https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0167404822004205 ). Some of the most critical vulnerabilities with SCADA systems are that when they were initially designed, they were created with air gaps to prevent intrusion. As technology has modernized, these air gaps have disappeared due to
the necessity for everything to be controlled remotely and through an interconnected network. The controlling technology was updated but not the protections for the systems themselves.

As we learned in our SCADA reading, modern SCADA systems do not even exist at
the location where the physical equipment is at. The SCADA system is hosted on a remote
network which adds multiple layers of vulnerabilities. The physical equipment could be
messed with but still made to produce the correct signals, which means that no one would
know something is wrong with the equipment until it is already happening. The data could
be intercepted on its way to the network, or the network itself misses a security update and reboots, allowing a moment where an attacker could slip into the system. All of these
modern variations of SCADA are immensely more efficient but sacrifice the air gapped safety that they once had.

I think having more physical protection at the location of equipment controlled by
SCADA network is a smart choice, to prevent physical connections at the actual site.
Keeping a 24/7 cybersecurity team on standby would also help keep this critical infrastructure much more safe. As shown by how many attacks there have been just in the
past few years on SCADA systems, they are obviously in dire need of an upgrade.

SCADA systems are often vulnerable because of their modernization. Losing an
airgap safety net in exchange for efficiency can lead to critical national infrastructure going down due to a malicious hack. I think all SCADA systems should be rebuilt from the ground up for the modern interconnected world. The SCADA systems need to be built with the worst potential situation in mind and start from that point. Just modernizing an old system is simply not enough. It leaves many vulnerabilities open to being exploited.