Certification for Industrial Control Systems

The first question typically asked is whether or not the number of security incidents against SCADA and control systems is increasing or decreasing. To help answer this, Fig. 1a graphs the frequency distribution of incident event dates. There are 14 categories of years ranging from 1982, the earliest incident event date in the database, to June 2006.

Fig. 1. Incident events by date from 1982 to June 1, 2006: (a) graphed as a frequency distribution; (b) charted as a percentage (105 records)

Clearly, cybersecurity incidents affecting control systems is not a new problem – as noted above, the earliest recorded incident occurred in 1982. However, these early incidents were sporadic, and the period of continuous annual incidents (i.e., where there is no year without a reported incident) didn’t begin until 1994. The first year to see a significant increase in the frequency of cybersecurity incidents as compared to earlier years was 1998. Notice that there is a striking increase in the annual incident rate starting in late 2001. As Fig. 1b indicates, even though the period from 2002 to June 2006 represents less than 20% of the total time scale, it contains almost 75% of reported incidents.