The beginning of that article:
From the what-could-possibly-go-wrong information comes this: An industrial management engineer just lately made a workstation a part of a botnet after inadvertently putting in malware promoting itself as a way for recovering misplaced passwords.
Misplaced passwords occur in lots of organizations. A programmable logic controller—used to automate processes inside factories, electrical crops, and different industrial settings—could also be arrange and largely forgotten over the next years. When a alternative engineer later identifies an issue affecting the PLC, they will uncover the now long-gone unique engineer by no means left the passcode behind earlier than departing the corporate.
In line with a weblog publish from safety agency Dragos, a whole ecosystem of malware makes an attempt to capitalize on eventualities like this one inside industrial amenities. On-line commercials like these beneath promote password crackers for PLCs and human-machine interfaces, that are the workhorses inside these environments.
Humorous sufficient, I needed to take care of a password protected PLC the place nobody knew the passwords or the place the code backups had been positioned…