Management. Control. It seems that you can’t stick five people in a room together without one of them trying to order the others around. This tendency towards centralized authority is not without reason, however – it is often more efficient to have one person, or thing, calling the shots. For an example of the latter, one needs look no further than Delta’s enteliBUS Manager, or eBMGR. Put simply, this device aims to centralize control for various pieces of hardware often found in corporate or industrial settings, whether it be temperature and humidity controls for a server room, a boiler and its corresponding alarms and sensors in a factory, or access control and lighting in a business. The advantages seem obvious, too – it can be configured to adjust fan speeds according to thermostat readings or sound an alarm if pressure crosses a certain threshold, all with little human interaction.
The disadvantages, while less obvious, become clear when one considers tech-savvy malicious actors. Suddenly, your potentially critical system now has a single point of failure, and one that is attached to a network, to make matters worse.
Consider for a moment a positive pressure room in a hospital, the kind typically used to keep out contaminants during surgeries. Managing rooms such as these is a typical application for the eBMGR and it does not take an overactive imagination to envision what kind of damage a bad actor could cause if they disrupted such a sensitive environment.
Management. Control. That’s what’s at stake if a device such as this is not properly secured. It’s also what made this device such a high priority for McAfee’s Advanced Threat Research team. The decision to make network-connected critical systems such as these demands an extremely high s ..
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