I guess you might have heard of the Large Hadron Collider hacker break in. It made me wonder as to whether this can happen to offshore control and safety systems. Here’s my thoughts on the topic:
- You need a doorway to hack into a system. Most (all that I’ve seen) offshore systems are standalone, and don’t have LAN, let alone Internet connections. Heck, for most of the DCS the only way you can transfer data is via 3.5″ disk (or was that 5.25″?). No USB ports, no CD drive. Maybe an RS-232 port, but you have to be on site to break in.
- If there is a web interface, you can be pretty sure that the PC acting as a gateway has the usual bells and whistles to prevent unauthorized entry. This assumes that the link allows two way communication.
- Even if you found a door, the architecture of a DCS is pretty specialised. Those who have hacked Windows, Macs, Linux systems will find their knowledge useless here. You won’t find published available APIs, object structures, weak kinks in the software, even a typical programming language. It’s all process loops, logic controls, and stuff. There’s no need to support third party development because, well there is no third party.
- You might just get into the DCS, but the worst you can do is shutdown the platform. All the safety stuff is handle by the safety systems, which have triple redundancy, programmed PLCs, etc. I’d like to see someone hack remotely into that.
BTW, the above comments are based on my own limited knowledge of DCS / Safety system setups. There’s someone out there who can correct me.
My version of security? You have to reach 10,000 points in a Tetris game before you get access to the guts of the machine.
Wata - Malaysian Oil and Gas Engineer 
Fortunately, existing systems are proprietary and they are of L2 architecture. Unfortunately, these are also the same systems that are going obsolete. You’re correct for L2 system and below, the hacker needs to be inside to infiltrate the database. Hackers would have a better chance if the system is L3 and above.
zzeed: how about an article on what L2 means to us mortals?