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We have two great new additions to the S4 2013 agenda. Both happen to involve the Siemens WinCC / S7 product family. Loyal blog readers have probably heard recently of Positive Technologies whitepaper SCADA Safety in Numbers, but we were more interested in a Computerworld article about 50+ vulnerabilties that Sergey and the team had found in WinCC / S7 and related products. These vulnerabilities were to be disclosed at Defcon but were pulled back — and Siemens has had full knowledge of them for months now.

We suggested to Sergey that S4 is an ideal venue to disclose these vulnerabilities and associated tools that Positive Technologies has developed. Personally I’m interested in seeing if any judgements can be made about Siemens coding practices for this product line, and to hear what Siemens response to this will be in the future. As I mentioned earlier, at some point a vendor (and their customers) have to realize the futility of patching a fundamentally flawed product.

The second new presentation is one of the 15-minute quick hits that we are adding to keep S4 lively. Erik Johansson of Management Doctors in Sweden will explain and demonstrate a tool that extracts the password from Siemens S7-400 packet captures. This includes the Level 3 passwords that have the most rights. This presentation is based off of work by Arne Vidström of the Swedish Defence Research Agency (FOI).

If you hadn’t noticed, S4 is very international. It draws the top technical talent, in both speakers and attendees. Here we have a Russian and Swedish presentation. We also have Luigi and Donato from Italy, Arthur Gervais from Germany, Ali Abassi from Iran, and Damiano Bolzoni from the Netherlands on the agenda. Last year 14 countries were present at S4, and we already have attendees registered from 12 countries.

Register for S4 now while space is available.

Image by Greg Peterson