Exploit Holes to Take Control of U.S. Infrastructure

""With concern mounting over recent cyber attacks on critical national infrastructures and government agencies, experts are pointing to the high vulnerability of remote automated industrial control systems, known as SCADAs, according to a report from Joseph Farah’s G2 Bulletin.

SCADAs, or Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition systems, are computer-based systems that monitor and control industrial processes remotely, enabling the automatic functioning of the nation’s critical infrastructures. They monitor and regulate the national electrical grid system; the flow of oil and natural gas; nuclear power facilities; finance and banking systems; telecommunications; the pumping of fuel; food and water delivery; rail and truck transportation; and traffic lights.

But SCADAs provide a gateway for hackers from anywhere in the world, because they don’t have firewalls, and their passwords and other access-control systems can be evaded.

The Obama administration acknowledged Thursday that hackers stole Social Security numbers, health histories and other highly sensitive data from more than 21 million people. Believed to be the largest data breach in U.S. history, it follows the disclosure earlier this year that hackers stole records for about 4.2 million people from the Office of Personnel Management’s personnel database.

Officials have privately linked both intrusions to China, according to the National Journal.

Last Wednesday, New York Stock Exchange trading, United Airlines flights, the Wall Street Journal website and other U.S. business activity were temporarily shut down. The official explanation blamed “technical glitches,” but some cyberwarfare experts believe the shutdowns were the result of a deliberate attack from hackers in China, as WND reported.

SCADAs “sit outside of traditional security walls,” according to a report by Symantec Corporation, an information technology security solutions company.

Get the full report from Joseph Farah’s G2 Bulletin.

The report said the risks are increasing as the technology progresses in the energy industry.

“As smart grid technology continues to gain momentum, more new energy systems will be connected to the Internet of Things, which opens up new security vulnerabilities related to having countless connected devices,” it said. “The increasing number of connected systems and centralized control for ICS systems means that the risk of attacks in the future will increase.”

Ripe for exploitation

Two Russian security researchers, Sergey Gordeychik and Gleb Gritsai of Positive Research, disclosed to the Chaos Communication Congress – an annual meeting of the international hacker scene – that they found more than 60,000 exposed control systems online that were ripe for exploitation by taking “full control of systems running energy, chemical and transportation systems.”

The Russian hackers discovered the ease at which they could gain full access to Programmable Logic Controllers, or PLCs.

As reported by Computer World, the two researchers identified more than 150 vulnerabilities in SCADA, ISC and PLCs, with 5 percent being “dangerous remote code execution holes.""

http://www.wnd.com/2015/07/hackers-exploit-holes-to-take-control-of-u-s-infrastructure/?cat_orig=us

Urban Legend Dogma of Bubonic Plague Infection Exploit Corrected

""For decades, scientists have thought the bacteria that cause the bubonic plague hijack host cells at the site of a fleabite and are then taken to the lymph nodes, where the bacteria multiply and trigger severe disease. But UNC School of Medicine researchers discovered that this accepted theory is off base. The bacteria do not use host cells; they traffic to lymph nodes on their own and not in great numbers.

In fact, most of the plague-causing bacteria – called Yersinia pestis – get trapped in a bottleneck either in the skin, while en route to the lymph node, or in the node itself. Only a few microbes break free to infect the lymph node and cause disease.

“Anytime you find something where the host is winning, you want to exploit it,” said Virginia Miller, PhD, professor of microbiology and immunology and senior author of the paper in PLoS Pathogens. “If we can understand how the host and the bacteria contribute to this bottleneck, then this could become something we’d target so we could either ramp up what’s causing the bottleneck or slow down the infection.”

The discovery offers much needed information about how virulent insect-borne diseases, such as plague, malaria, and dengue virus cause infection. The findings also present new routes for research on how bacterial strains cause disease despite the immune system’s best efforts.

The plague, which killed millions of people during the Middle Ages, is contracted by several people each year in the western United States. Outbreaks have occurred in the recent past in India and Africa, and one is unfolding right now in Madagascar. Standard antibiotics are effective against Y. pestis if taken early enough. But infection can go undetected for days, making diagnosis difficult and antibiotics less effective the longer the bacteria take root.

There are three kinds of plague all caused by Y. pestis: bubonic, which is contracted through fleabite; pneumonic, which is contracted by breathing in the bacteria; and septicemic, which is a severe infection of blood.

Miller’s team studies the pneumonic and bubonic versions. Three years ago, Rodrigo Gonzalez, PhD – a UNC graduate student at the time and now a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard – searched the scientific literature for data confirming the accepted notion that Y. pestis gets trafficked by human phagocytic cells from the fleabite site to the lymph nodes.

Scientists readily accepted this idea because when Y. pestis microbes are added to phagocytic cells in culture, the cells do soak up the bacteria.
Phagocytes essentially eat harmful microbes, and because these cells traffic through the lymphatic system, scientists came to the logical conclusion that phagocytes take the Y. pestis to the lymph nodes.""

Read More

http://www.biosciencetechnology.com/news/2015/02/scientists-overturn-dogma-bubonic-plague