Scada Security?

This article focuses on the introduction of advance security checks to counter negative publicity of supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) systems. The SCADA security concerns have come to be seen as a big deal because the systems can be found within power plants, refineries, pipelines, water treatment plants, and the telecommunications industry, where hackers could do great damage that would affect the public. In light of SCADA security concerns, security researchers have stepped up efforts to find and to call attention to the systems’ vulnerabilities. As national attention has only recently turned to SCADA security, system users have few regulatory specifications by which they must abide. In 2006, the federal government charged the North American Electric Reliability Corp., or NERC, with defining and implementing standards for critical infrastructure protection within the industry. A number of pieces of legislation have been passed and proposed to address software security. The big one right now is the Cybersecurity Act of 2012, which has been introduced by Senator Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut.