It began as a hobby for a teenage computer programmer named John Matherly, who wondered how much he could learn about devices linked to the Internet.
After tinkering with code for nearly a decade, Matherly eventually developed a way to map and capture the specifications of everything from desktop computers to network printers to Web servers.
He called his fledgling search engine Shodan, and in late 2009 he began asking friends to try it out. He had no inkling it was about to alter the balance of security in cyberspace.
“I just thought it was cool,” said Matherly, now 28.
Matherly and other Shodan users quickly realized they were revealing an astonishing fact: Uncounted numbers of industrial control computers, the systems that automate such things as water plants and power grids, were linked in, and in some cases they were wide open to exploitation by even moderately talented hackers.
Control computers were built to run behind the safety of brick walls. But such security is rapidly eroded by links to the Internet. Recently, an unknown hacker broke into a water plant south of Houston using a default password he found in a user manual. A Shodan user found and accessed the cyclotron at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Yet another user found thousands of unsecured Cisco routers, the computer systems that direct data on the networks.
“There’s no reason these systems should be exposed that way,” Matherly said. “It just seems ludicrous.”
The rise of Shodan illuminates the rapid convergence of the real world and cyberspace, and the degree to which machines that millions of people depend on every day are becoming vulnerable to intrusion and digital sabotage. It also shows that the online world is more interconnected and complex than anyone fully understands, leaving us more exposed than we previously imagined.
Over the past two years, Shodan has gathered data on nearly 100 million devices, recording their exact locations and the software systems that run them.
“Expose online devices,” the Web site says. “Webcams. Routers. Power Plants. iPhones. Wind Turbines. Refrigerators. VoIP Phones.”
Homeland security officials have warned that the obscurity that had protected many industrial control systems was fast disappearing in a flood of digital light.
“This means that these delicate [control computers] are potentially reachable from the Internet by malicious and skilled adversaries,” a Department of Homeland Security paper concluded in 2010.
The number of intrusions and attacks in the United States is rising fast. From October to April, the DHS received 120 incident reports, about the same as for all of 2011. But no one knows how often breaches have occurred or how serious they have been. Companies are under no obligation to report such intrusions to authorities.
A weak link in the system
Industrial control systems are the workhorses of the information age. Like other computers, they run on code and are programmable. Unlike laptops, smartphones and other consumer technology, they’re stripped down and have little style or glitz.
Costing as little as a few thousand dollars and up to $50,000, they’re often housed in plain metal boxes with few lights or switches. Control systems now open and shut water pipes, regulate the flow of natural gas, manage the production of chemicals, and run data centers, power-plant turbines and commuter trains.
The control computers collect data from electronic sensors, analyze it and send it on to desktop computers that serve as the “human-machine interface.” They afford managers precise and remote control of the machinery.
The most far-flung and powerful of these networked systems are called supervisory control and data acquisition, or SCADA. They give companies central control of large numbers of pumps, generators, oil rigs and other operations.
The allure of long-distance network control is hard to resist. Manufacturers of control computers have promised that such networks can cut costs by reducing the number of workers in the field. Siemens Industry Inc., a leader in the field, said in a recent marketing brochure that it is “more important than ever” to adopt control devices “to respond to the increasing international competitive pressure.”
The systems are often hardened against weather or tough conditions and can run nonstop for months or years. But many were designed for another era, before the mesh of networks reached into every corner of the globe, and some of the systems rely on outdated hardware and software.
A recent examination of major control systems by six hacker-researchers working with the security firm Digital Bond found that six of seven devices in the study were riddled with hardware and software flaws. Some included back doors that enabled the hackers to download passwords or sidestep security completely.
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