Analyst's note:  If you think all we have to do to lose money and watch our infrastructure crumble before our eyes is to watch the stock market ... not so.

"The computer systems that control vital industrial machinery in nuclear power plants, water treatment facilities and many other factories are vulnerable to deadly sabotage by hackers with even moderate skills, security researchers say.

Dillon Beresford, who works for security firm NSS Labs, showed at a security conference in Las Vegas how he had successfully hacked into special computer systems that are made by Siemens and other companies and are used in thousands of industrial plants.

The Siemens equipment that Mr. Beresford hacked, called Industrial Control Systems or ICS, is the same product targeted by Stuxnet, the sophisticated computer worm discovered last year to have crippled Iran’s nuclear program.

Stuxnet reprogrammed the computer-controlled centrifuges used to enrich uranium so that they spun out of control and destroyed themselves.

What Mr. Beresford’s work shows is “you don’t need Stuxnet to do real damage” to industrial plants, Vikram Phatak, chief technology officer of NSS Labs, told The Washington Times.

[....] Mr. Weiss said the exact level of skill required to hack an ICS system would depend on the setup at the facility and the kind of attack the hackers wanted to carry out.

“If you just want to stop the facility, that’s one thing,” he said. “If you want to destroy the machinery [as Stuxnet did], that’s harder.”