[vox] [OT] Slammer knocked out nuclear plant safety monitoring system

[Rob Rogers]

On Wed, Aug 20, 2003 at 14:20:03PM -0700, Bill Kendrick wrote:
> 
> On the heels of last week's east coast black-out and MS Blaster worm
> comes an interesting news story about how the Slammer worm took out part
> of an internal network at a nuclear power plant in Ohio, back in January.
> 
>   http://securityfocus.com/news/6767
> 
> 
>     "The Slammer worm penetrated a private computer network at Ohio's
>     Davis-Besse nuclear power plant in January and disabled a safety
>     monitoring system for nearly five hours, despite a belief by plant
>     personnel that the network was protected by a firewall... According to
>     the reports, plant computer engineers hadn't installed the patch for the
>     MS-SQL vulnerability that Slammer exploited. In fact, they didn't know
>     there was a patch, which Microsoft released six months before Slammer
>     struck."
> 
> 
> This was submitted to me for addition to the "Reasons to Avoid Microsoft"
> page.  I also decied it was worthy of submitting to Slashdot.
> (*cough* Karma whore *cough*)

I just read this article this morning...The most interesting part I
though was they assumed they were safe because they had a firewall, but
it came in through a non-firewalled entrance. They had an T1 going from
an outside contrator's site to a point on their network that was behind
their firewall. The lesson to be learned here is, just because you trust
someone else, doesn't mean you can trust their network. :)