Industry News

New PLC Malware Leverages Processor Problems to Go Dark

November 16, 2016
Robert Bergman

While this malware isn’t out in the wild and won’t be anytime soon, it highlights a common trait of all PLC’s – except Bedrock. It all starts with pins (our backplane is pinless). PLCs use specific configurations of input/output (I/O) pins to both monitor and control the status of specific hardware, sensors or tools.. Ali Abbasi, who will present his findings at the upcoming Black Hat Europe 2016 conference. designed this malware to highlight the next generation of potential issues and encourage manufacturers to correct existing PLC problems before sending new iterations to market. Abbasi’s PLC malware is able to switch the I/O configuration of PLC pins to fundamentally change the way the computer operates… the message? Go pinless….