Officials with the Federal Bureau of Prisons have been informed that U.S. penitentiaries could be vulnerable to cyber attacks that would help prisoners escape.

 

Most American prisons are operated by industrial control systems (ICS) that also are used by power plants, water treatment facilities and other infrastructure operations. ICS’ vulnerability was demonstrated two years in Iran, when hackers sabotaged that country’s nuclear program by exploiting its Siemens programmable logic controllers (PLCs). Almost all of the 117 federal correctional facilities, 1,700 prisons and 3,000+ jails in the United States use PLCs to control doors and manage their security systems.

 

In the case of prisons, a cyber attack could disable controls that lock cell doors, while “the system would be telling the control room they are all closed,” John Strauchs, a former Central Intelligence Agency operations officer whose firm produced the report for the bureau, told the Washington Times.

 

Hackers also could disrupt secure communications throughout a prison and crash closed-circuit television systems, leaving guards blind to certain wings and hallways, according to Strauchs.

-Noel Brinkerhoff

 

Prisons Bureau Alerted to Hacking into Lockups (by Shaun Waterman, Washington Times)