While discussing Smart Grids with a guest at the Paris NOW event earlier this week, TIBCO’s Al Harrington mentioned to me the discovery of the Stuxnet worm. This unconventionally targets SCADA controllers of the type used in many industrial control systems – power plants, water utilities, etc – and indicates the start of a distinct threat against current and future Smart Grid and similar systems. This does raise an interesting CEP issue, namely understanding the provenance of events being monitored as well as the reliability of our event sources.
Interestingly, it appears Stuxnet is using the usual-security-target of a PC running Windows just as a means to deliver its payload to SCADA systems. Also it is somewhat incredible that the first report of attack was from the controversial Iranian nuclear power program. So is this a cybersecurity issue, or a cyberwarfare offensive?
