News

Vulnerabilities detected in industrial terminals

Industrial operations and utility companies have long been a target of cybercriminals looking to disrupt critical infrastructure. Long standing tensions between the United States and its rivals including Iran and China have begun to manifest in the form of targeted cyberattacks. According to the Christian Science Monitor, China-backed hackers are believed to have launched assaults against nearly two dozen American natural gas pipeline operations over a six-month period. Those breaches resulted in the theft of critical data that could be used to launch devastating attacks against the nation's natural energy infrastructure, experts told the news outlet. 

Concerns over the threat cybercrime poses to industrial and energy operations have been raised by several members of the United States government. For instance, former Defense Secretary Leon Panetta warned that foreign hackers could potentially launch a "cyber-Pearl Harbor" attack against the nation's infrastructure, reported the New York Times.

Aging and insufficiently protected equipment may be exacerbating these threats even further. A recent study discovered that more than 114,000 industrial terminal servers connected to the internet were insecurely configured, Computer World reported. This vulnerability would allow hackers to access the servers' networks and potentially gain control of any system connected to them, including traffic lights, fuel pumps, building automation and industrial control equipment.

The issue is that while terminal servers support authentication measures that control access to their systems, these controls do not extend to the attached serial ports.  Additionally, many of the systems were found to possess weak or even non-existent encryption solutions to secure communications between networks. The study's researchers recommended that enterprises deploy authentication measures to control the access of serial ports. Furthermore, they stressed that organizations should utilize encryption solutions such as SSL certificates to prevent hackers from compromising in-transit data.

Enterprises across every industry are vulnerable to the threat of cybercrime. Encrypt critical data with an SSL certificate today.

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