For those who do not know, 747’s are big flying Unix hosts. At the time, the engine management system on this particular airline was Solaris based. The patching was well behind and they used telnet as SSH broke the menus and the budget did not extend to fixing this. The engineers could actually access the engine management system of a 747 in route. If issues are noted, they can re-tune the engine in air.
The issue here is that all that separated the engine control systems and the open network was NAT based filters. There were (and as far as I know this is true today), no extrusion controls. They filter incoming traffic, but all outgoing traffic is allowed. For those who engage in Pen Testing and know what a shoveled shell is… I need not say more.
FACT CHECK: SCADA Systems Are Online Now by Craig S Wright for INFOSEC Island.
Who knew Boeing 747’s were huge UNIX zombies in-waiting? Convenience and paranoia of a secure firewall breaking some “mission critical” functionality is all too common. It is for these reasons that there is so much half-ass security implementations in the wild.
Unfortunately, our leaders rarely see the benefit of security. In fact, security merely sucks resources - money and people and money - without providing any immediate return on investment. Security ROI is a subjective, political art many are unable to master.
Our leaders are all too willing to take huge risks, falsely believing their systems and networks will not be targeted or their half-ass security posture is enough to withstand an attack. Can you imagine what might happen if malicious attackers were able to gain control of a 747’s engine management system?
I cannot fathom why, other than pure laziness, these systems are not properly secured. With a layered defense posture, combined ingress and egress firewalls and filters, it would be fairly easy to secure these systems. This is utterly flabbergasting.
