While we seldom consider an
industrial hog production facility to be a cyber-target a
recent TV news story out of Iowa shows how an industrial control system
could be used by eco-terrorists to conduct an attack. The news story tells of a
Sioux County Sherriff report of tampering with a climate control system that
resulted in the death of 475 hogs.
It appears that this tampering was done manually, but reports of
vulnerabilities in environmental control systems clearly shows that remote
manipulation of similar controls could have the same end. It would also make it
easier to affect attacks on multiple facilities and make it less likely that
the perpetrator would get caught in the act.
Industrial scale feed operations have long been a target of
environmentalists (and one would assume by extension the radical fringe of that
movement) because of the problems with waste management and the resulting
environmental damage from the release of untreated wastes.
Now pig farms are hardly critical infrastructure and have
not made anyone’s list of facilities that need cybersecurity regulation. But, it
just goes to show that cyber-terrorism has the potential to be used by any
number of malcontents. This is not a call for regulation, but a call for more
widespread discussion about industrial control system vulnerabilities.
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