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MichaelCrawford | 10 years ago
Startup Weekend entrepreneurial event on alert after man threatens explosions, guns
In reality I was lecturing the Starup Weekend corporation on Engineering Ethics. I'll explain in more detail some other time on my own site, then submit the link.
I do not want to be specific about the bug I referred to when I tweeted that anyone with a basic understanding of computers could detonate a large industrial facility from the comfort of their own home, but I will say that the actual detonate is Trihedral Engineer's VTS HMI/SCADA industrial control systems product.
It has since been renamed "VTScada". I expect that's because I BCCed one of Trihedral's three partners, the one who does all their sales and marketing, on my eMail to New Orleans industrial control systems engineer Roger Williams in which I requested he forward my Kuro5hin diary about Glenn Wadden's Deep Insight Into The Nature Of Reality to his colleagues in the Gulf offshore oil industry.
Roger's ROFFLECOPTER arrived in my Inbox twenty minutes later. He knew very well I had BCCed someone at Trihedral but he had no clue who it was. In his reply, Roger complimented me for my persuasive rhetoric, as well as pointed out that I was an even more effective troll than he was.
My bunker buster bug is easily patched but Trihedral has no way to verify that their users have actually installed their patches. Were I to point out how to exploit it, a great many large industrial facilities would detonate. You don't want to do that.
However I will point out some other, far less likel yet deadly bugs that, given VTS' steaming pile of C++ source, would be quite intractible to fix. Trihedral has no hope whatsover of fixing all of them without a complete rewrite:
Jonathan Swift Sticks It To The Man
> If the single installation of a Human Machine Interface / Supervisory Control And Data Acquisition product used to control a Giant Robotic Automobile Assembly Plant is not Exception-Safe...
You Will Drop a Pickup Truck
On One of Your Plant's Workers
Thereby Making a Widow of His Wife Instantly.
I don't actually know but assertively speculate that VTScada is that complete rewrite. I will give them credit for VTScada's far-richer user interface.
Insightfully well-designed and implemented UI is of vital importance to Human Machine Interface / Supervisory Control And Data Acquisition Products. Consider that Three Mile Island was the result in part of all the knobs in its control room being identical.
I once saw a photo of a reactor control panel where someone had replace all the knobs with beer keg tap handles. :-D
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