[Series 01] Indian SCADA Systems - Current Status?

SCADA i.e., Supervisory Control And Data Acquisition is a real time industrial process control systems used to centrally monitor and control remote or local industrial equipment such as motors, valves, pumps, relays etc. SCADA is used to control:

• chemical plant processes,
• oil and gas pipelines,
• electrical generation and transmission equipment,
• manufacturing facilities,
• water purification and distribution infrastructures etc.

On 31 July, 2012 a news broke relating to the blackout in 20 states of India due to Northern Electricity Grid Failure which subsequently led to the failure of Eastern and North Eastern Electricity Grid Failure. 

Browser Forensic Tool (BFT) - A Benign Tool or Malign Tool??

Someone referred me to the UNREMOTE link where an interesting article was posted about a tool named as "Browser Forensic Tool (BFT)". The link is given below:

http://unremote.org/2012/02/09/bft-browser-forensic-tool/

About BFT:

According to the above given link, BFT is a software that will search in all kind of browser history (even archived) in few seconds. It will retrieve URLs and Title with chosen keywords of all matching search. One can use default example profiles or create a new one, with thematic search.

At first hand since never heard something like this, hence, it was obvious for me to take BFT for a test ride and to know whether it is worth using or not.

Additionally, the website BrotherSoft's Publisher also gives the following comment on BFT as:

You wan't to search very quickly in the History of all common browsers
even archived ones by keywords list (manageable) ?

This software is made for you, for companies, anti cyber criminal companies,
 for particular this software will simplify your life and save hours of manual researching. you can free download Browser Forensic Tool 1.0 now.

Reference: http://www.brothersoft.com/browser-forensic-tool-486857.html

Hence, I installed it in a Virtual Machine having an Operating System of Microsoft Windows 7 Professional Version with all the necessary Security Tools installed viz. Anti-Virus, Intrusion Detection System (IDS), Wireshark etc.

The Journey of Stuxnet - The Cyber Missile for Cyber Sabotage of Critical Infrastructure

Stuxnet is a computer worm discovered in July 2010. It targets Siemens industrial software and equipment running on Microsoft Windows. While it is not the first time that crackers have targeted industrial systems, it is the first discovered malware that spies on and subverts industrial systems, and the first to include a programmable logic controller (PLC) rootkit.

A Deeper Look at Malware Networks

Malware and malicious software have been around for years. Malware Networks don’t traditionally come with names, as one might expect, but the security industry has now been tracking the biggest malware offenders for long enough that they’ve been able to identify trends. Traditionally, malware has been identified by particular attacks (and named accordingly), but the reality, is that some networks have grown so large that they have their hands in many different scams at once. And they need names, because these networks are fast, and they’re slippery. The average number of unique host names per day for the top 10 malware delivery networks is 4,107, and an average of over 40,000 users make unwitting requests to malware networks each day. 

Read on to get an idea of some of the size, shape and growing threat of larger Malware networks, their points of entry and a list of prevention techniques. This is created by Blue Coat's Senior malware researcher Chris Larsen has pulled data from the company's Mid-Year Security Report, 2011.