NEWS: Industrial Control Systems Killed Once and Will kill

[Tomi Engdahl]

Industrial Control Systems Killed Once and Will Again, Experts Warn
April 09, 2008 | 5:18:53 PMCategories: RSA Conference
http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2008/0 ... -cont.html

"On June 10th, 1999 a 16-inch diameter steel pipeline operated by the now-defunct Olympic Pipeline Co. ruptured near Bellingham, Washington, flooding two local creeks with 237,000 gallons of gasoline. The gas ignited into a mile-and-a-half river of fire that claimed the lives of two 10-year-old boys and an 18-year-old man, and injured eight others."

"Wednesday, computer-security experts who recently re-examined the Bellingham incident called its victims the first verified human causalities of a control-system computer incident. They argue that government cybersecurity standards currently under debate might have prevented the tragedy."

"The NTSB concluded that if the SCADA system computers had remained responsive to the commands of the Olympic controllers, the controller operating the pipeline probably would have been able to initiate actions that would have prevented the pressure increase that ruptured the pipeline," reads the NIST report.

"These are the first fatalities from a control-system cyberevent that I can document, and for a fact say that this really occurred," Weiss said in an earlier interview with Wired.com.