Back Doors to Critical Infrastructure

Yesterday while my wife was gardening near our home's natural gas meter, she smelled the odorant which suggested there might be gas escaping near the meter. It wasn't an emergency, but she called Avista. A technician responded promptly, found the very minor leak, and fixed it.

Being a technologically curious person, I asked the service technician how Avista's wireless meter reading was working out. He seemed a bit surprised that I even knew about it. He seemed even more surprised that I was aware of security risks created when utility companies began to use wireless technologies (known as Supervisory Control and Data Acquistion or SCADA systems) to read and control systems.

In its August 2006 edition of its member magazine Signal, the Armed Forces Communications and Electronics Association discusses SCADA vulnerabilities in an article entitled Back Doors Beckon Openly. The article refers to a Government Accountability Office report published nearly three years ago that went into considerable detail about the SCADA threat.

Public utilities (gas, water, electric, telecommunications) are part of our critical infrastructure. We as consumers should be aware of how prevalent SCADA systems are in our communities so we can report suspicious activities that may represent an effort to exploit a system vulnerability.