Dear Chevron: Thanks for letting us know you’ve been infected with Stuxnet. It’s difficult to muster sympathy for your management or shareholders, because you were warned.This guy quite clearly warned your industry, as did other firms specializing in technology security.

Every single manufacturer around the world using supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) driven equipment in their processes was warned. Businesses at particular risk are those relying on certain ubiquitous applications in a networked environment.

Perhaps you heeded the warning months ago but didn’t disclose widely that your business was working on eliminating the exposures. If your business has been hardening your systems, great. However, the public does have a right to know know if your plant located in their backyard might blow up or release toxic chemicals because your firm was exposed to cyber warfare elements our country sponsored in some fashion.

This goes for any other firms out there that are dealing with the same exposure. Perhaps you believe it’s a business intelligence risk to let your competitors know you’ve got a problem– frankly, we’re way past that. The potential risks to the public outweigh your short-term profitability, and if your plant blows up/dumps chemicals/produces unsafe or faulty products because of Stuxnet, our public problem becomes your public relations/long-term shareholder value problem anyhow.

By the way: perhaps it might be worthwhile to actively recruit American citizens who qualify for security clearance when hiring SCADA application analysts to fix your Stuxnet problems. Why compound your problem for lack of foresight with regard to national security risks? We can see you’re hiring. Ahem. Continue reading →