Critical infrastructures are nowadays both essential for society and risk-prone due to their vulnerability to failures and attacks, as proved, taking as example power infrastructures, by the electrical damages which have occurred both in Europe and in the USA during the past years. The situation is even more complicated due to inter-dependencies among primary infrastructures.
Cyber attacks against SCADA systems are considered extremely dangerous for CI operation and must be addressed in a specific way. Technical analyses are helping researchers around the world in finding the best ways to protect SCADA systems. June 2010 was an important milestone with the discovery of the Stuxnet worm targeting SCADA systems.
Amr Thabet, performed a technical analysis and provided many details about the behaviour of the worm and concluding that Stuxnet is the most sophisticated malware ever seen in public until that date. Michael Hale Ligh, provided a memory footprint of the Stuxnet worm using Volatility Framework, which is helpful for detecting the presence of Stuxnet in a system.
There is still a lot of work to do in the protection against vulnerabilities. A recent research using fuzzing tools performed by McCorkle and Rios found 665 bugs on SCADA systems, 75 of them leading to exploits.