Cyber security for automatic test equipment

The initial focus for the cyber security community has been to make operating systems and networks more secure and harder to penetrate. These improvements are making it more difficult to exploit these systems, driving attackers to turn their attention to embedded systems and hardware exploitation. It is expected that new threats from improperly secured embedded operating systems, poorly defended firmware applications, and weak hardware communication protocols will be the next generation of attacks that have a high probability to significantly affect the maintenance community over the next few years. In essence, attackers will be viewing test equipment as the "PC equivalent to USB devices." By exploiting trusted relationships in hardware systems, malware can be transported through the maintenance equipment, causing infection or misconfiguration of mission critical systems. These infections can spread to other parts of the weapons platform or potentially lay in wait until some predefined action occurs to expose itself and alter the intended mission or cause catastrophic damage to the weapons platform.