From:  The Conversation

US President Barack Obama is seeking US$14 billion to tackle it. The UK wants to build a start-up industry around it. And Australia is in the middle of what could be a year-long review into getting better at it. The issue is cyber security, and at risk is the entire digital economy and consumer confidence in it. In this Cyber insecurity series we investigate the size and nature of the cyber crime threat, the industry growing with it, and the solutions emerging to get in front of it.

Zahir Tari, Professor in Distributed Systems, School of Computer Science and IT at RMIT University and Carlos Queiroz, PhD at RMIT University

The systems responsible for controlling and monitoring most of our national infrastructure – the services that our society relies on, are known as Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) systems.

These systems, on which infrastructure such as power stations, water distribution, roads and public transport rely on, are increasingly the target of cybercriminals. Needless to say, any disruptions to such systems could at best result in financial disasters and at worst the loss of lives.

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