Safe and secure; are you sure?

Movies often over dramatize potential situations we all face. Oftentimes they do this to drive home a point.
Not to sound overly dramatic, but look at your bank account, then your credit card, then your stock portfolio, then your cell phone. After you get to work, think about your credit union account, your pension and 401K and all the passwords you use on a daily basis to run your system.
Then think about what would happen to you and all the people that depend on you if they all disappeared with a click of the mouse. Sound overly dramatic? It shouldn’t, because these have all happened at some point over the past few years.
“Right now our critical infrastructure is vulnerable to a devastating attack,” Dan O’Dowd, president and chief executive at Green Hills Software said Monday at the company’s Embedded Software Summit in Santa Barbara, Calif. “Last year some one hacked into the Athens telephone system and bugged the prime minister’s cell phone. Greece still hasn’t found out how it was done.”
O’Dowd went into a litany of possible strike areas and he showed clips from a movie to dramatize the potential, but the scary thing is, the examples he gave were real and they could happen.
Surely there are people out in the automation industry that say “yeah, it can happen to other industries, but who would want to attack a plant?” The answer is anybody can attack at any time.
“Security from our standpoint is an arms race,” said David Grawrock, principle engineer and lead security architect at Intel Corp. “Attackers will find vulnerabilities and we have to find them. Let’s make it easier for IT departments to protect their platforms. If you don’t have control, you don’t have knowledge and you can make changes.”