Lack of federal funds has set back the progress of a number of government computer security programs aimed at improving Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) systems. Witnesses at congressional hearings last week expressed some impatience with both the utility industry’s refusal to take SCADA technical gaps seriously and the government’s inability to get security solutions out to the private sector more quickly. The hearings were held in the House Government Reform subcommittee on technology, information policy, intergovernmental relations and the census. Robert Dacey, director of information security issues at the U.S. General Accounting Office (GAO), cited program slowdowns at the Department of Energy’s National SCADA Test Bed located at the Idaho National Engineering and Environmental Laboratory where hardware and software is supposed to be tested. He also said that the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the National Security Agency (NSA) have had to cut back on their efforts on defining a common set of information security requirements for control systems, which is being coordinated through the Process Controls Security Requirements Forum (PCSRF). Full Story
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