Austin April 2015 Luncheon

"Say Hello to Your Power Plant: Cybersecurity & Internet-Connected Control Systems"

The ecosystem of industrial control systems is growing up and they're starting to become accessible to everyday engineers. Proprietary protocols are being reverse engineered and open-source reference implementations can be found on GitHub. As a result it has become possible to keep track in real-time of all ICS devices that are directly connected to the Internet. This talk covers the history of ICS on the Internet, explains the work required to discover Internet-connected control systems and how the ecosystem is following the trajectory of other sectors that went through similar transformations.

Our speaker John Matherly is an Internet cartographer, speaker and founder of Shodan, the world’s first search engine for the Internet-connected devices. He moved to the San Diego area at the age of 17 and worked at the San Diego Supercomputer Center to help manage the world’s foremost protein data bank. At the same time, he was also attending the University of California San Diego’s bioinformatics program which would kindle his fascination with large data and efficient algorithms. After graduating, he worked as a freelance software engineer at a variety of companies including bioinformatics work.

In 2009, John’s project, the Shodan search engine, was unveiled on Twitter and within hours the website received a great deal of attention due to the unexpected discoveries that people made. Printers, webcams, power plants and more, many of them unprotected or minimally protected, were found over time and the revelations have changed the way security and privacy on the Internet is perceived. Shodan is already seeing TVs, cell phones, traffic lights, industrial controls, infrastructure plants and various home appliances pop-up in the search results. And more of these “Internet of Things” are added each day as the world is becoming more connected. In the past few years, John and Shodan has been featured in the news on CNBC, CNN Money, Bloomberg, Washington Post, Forbes and many others.