Slideshow

On the front line against the next Stuxnet

Meet the people who will get the call when the next Stuxnet worm strikes

  • Marty Edwards at one of the INL Control Systems Research Bays. This one is set up to simulate a chemical plant.

  • DHS and INL do more than incident response at their Iowa Falls facilities. Here ICS-CERT instructor Mark Fabro walks the press through a typical training session. Check out the chemical and electrical programmable logic controllers behind him. A few minutes later he showed how it was possible to take control of an electrical substation and then hide what he was doing via a man-in-the middle attack.

  • There's plenty of stuff to hack here at INL. Here is equipment used to simulate a pipeline. The room also included Honeywell controllers.

  • In urgent situations, ICS-CERT deploys away teams, who go into infected facilities and figure out what's going on. This is the type of gear they take with them.

  • There's a lot of Windows XP running at Idaho National Labs.

  • Red Team leader Mark Fabro assesses the situation during a mock cyber exercise at INL.

  • Jeff Hahn in front of his hacked chemical system. The read team took control of the system's HMI software after he clicked on a malicious link.

  • Greg Schaffer, Acting Deputy Under Secretary, DHS National Protection and Programs Directorate talks at the ICS-CERT Watch floor. This is one of two ops centers that handle security response for industrial control systems. The second is at the National Cybersecurity and Communications Integration Center in Washington DC. The DC center operates 24x7. Not so here at the Iowa Falls facility.

  • The ICS-CERT Malware Laboratory. When the Watch Floor gets a new malware sample, they send it to these guys for analysis.

  • The DHS and vendors pay INL to conduct security assessments of their products at the INL engineering facilities. But the testing is done pretty much in secret. It's often never publicly known who gets tested and what vulnerabilities are discovered.

  • With three signs on the door, ICS-CERT makes it really clear that you can't bring a cell phone into its classified watch floor. They made an exception and allowed photographers there Thursday, but still no cell phones... or Blackberries.

  • Computers at the ICS-CERT Malware Lab in Idaho Falls, Idaho. This is where ICS-CERT did its initial Stuxnet analysis. The computers here are able to network with industrial control systems located at the facility.

  • The U.S. Department of Homeland Security's Industrial Control Systems Cyber Emergency Response Team operates a classified watch floor in this building in Iowa Falls, Iowa. DHS and Idaho National Labs opened their doors for a rare press event Thursday.

  • Marty Edwards. He's the director of ICS-CERT and of the DHS Control Systems Security Proram.

  • Idaho National Labs

  • Jeff Hahn, second from left, assesses the situation during an INL cyber exercise Friday.

  • A look at the ICS-CERT Watch Floor dashboard, showing what's happening at the moment. If you're a hacker and you've found a bug in, say, a Honeywell system. This Watch Floor is where you call to responsibly disclose the issue.

  • OK you've made it through the door, but while you're in the stairwell going up to the ICS-CERT Watch Floor, you still can't talk about classified stuff.

  • A Blue Team participant at a cyber security exercise at Idaho National Laboratory.

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