Upcoming: 2006 Process Control and SCADA Security Summit Part II and DHS, DOE courses, Sept. 28-30
The U.S. Departments of Homeland Security and Energy will offer free classes during Part II of the SCADA Security Summit for control system engineers and IT professionals who need or want a deeper understanding of security in control systems. The courses, both introductory and intermediate, will be held Sept. 28-30 at Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas.
There are 40 seats for the full-day, hands-on course and 120 seats for the half-day course; both of are taught by experts at Idaho National Laboratory and said to be fast-paced. The classes are meant not only to facilitate students in understanding how attacks against SCADA systems are launched and why they work, but also to provide mitigation strategies to increase the cyber security posture of one’s control system network.
The introductory course is targeted to system managers and control operators for power and energy generation, transmission and distribution organizations. It will cover, among other topics, common vulnerabilities of control systems, inappropriate use of wireless communication, and lack of detection and logging of intrusion. There will also be a cyber security awareness demonstration video.
The intermediate course is a more technical class and attendees are required to bring a laptop. Information security personnel, SCADA security personnel, network engineers, and SCADA engineers/integrators and developers are recommended to take this more hands-on course. Among the topics planned are general security observations and pitfalls, dissecting SCADA protocols, and common programming pitfalls.
The Summit is a two-part program designed to empower control system users and vendors to form a global coalition to reduce the risk of cyber attacks. This second part is designed to help those in attendance understand what can be done now to improve security of their SCADA and process control systems.
For complete course and summit information, click here .
Click here to read “Live hacking into your process,” with information about Idaho National Lab personnel’s success in hacking into a control system, from Control Engineering .
—Edited by Lisa Sutor , Control Engineering contributing editor
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