Real risks in virtual space

摘要

In March 2008, a nuclear power station in Georgia, USA was forced into an emergency shutdown after a software update was made by a technician on a business computing network. The problem was that this series of computers were in communication with the operational network of the Hatch nuclear power plant, at Baxley, and when the technician rebooted the business network, it reset data on the control system, incorrectly informing it that fuel rod water cooling reservoirs had fallen to a critical level. Emergency computing systems triggered a shutdown.rnHatch's Southern Company spokeswoman Carrie Phillips later told the Washington Post "We were investigating cyber-vulnerabilities and discovered that the systems were communicating, we just had not implemented corrective action prior to the automatic [reboot]." Plant engineers have since removed all network connections between the affected servers, but Internet security experts have highlighted the incident as an example of how computer systems that werernlinked together at a time before the Internet can pose real vulnerabilities.