For the past several years many politicians and security experts within both North American  have warned of “cyber war” and the potential vulnerability to national infrastructure.  Although this may seem extreme, and perhaps fear mongering with the agenda of enhancing security over personal liberties, I believe there is a growing need for concern because of the systems that control many of the western world’s infrastructure. These systems called SCADA, have often been cited as a critical security vulnerability to a cyber attack and with good reason.

Supervisory control and data acquisition or SCADA systems as well as digital control systems otherwise known as SCADA systems, which originated in the 1960s are mainly used for controlling a particular process or monitoring a certain process.  For example, all major water system authorities in the U.S have these SCADA systems. They work on site automatically and need no human controller by collecting data from sensors in devices used for industrial processing and then storing this data.

The vulnerability  of SCADA systems remains high since nearly all SCADA systems are accessible through the internet to saves cost but in doing so increases vulnerability . SCADA systems are involved in an array of vital infrastructure control  including electricity, oil, gas, water treatment, waste management, and maritime, air, railroad and automobile traffic control industries,  as well as telecommunications including 911 emergency calls. The vulnerability to cyber attacks is alarmingly high, because  the small drone like computer systems have virtually no security, firewalls, routers, or antivirus software to protect them whiling being  spread across a nations infrastructure , even in some of the most remote places imaginable. Furthermore all industrial control systems have long life cycles often 10 to 20 years and older systems were originally designed with no idea that terrorists would conceivably target infrastructure through cyberspace or with any concept of terrorism at all, and thus have little to no cyber-security, and also happen to be interconnected in ways never originally intended.

Some evidence exists that Al Qaeda is evolving into the cyber attack world as plausible option for future operations. Laptops recovered from Al Qaeda operatives held critical information on program data and software sites for SCADA info, giving alarm to the already theorized and now credible threat of a cyber attack on such systems, creating a security dilemma for the future of our infrastructure.