The Impact of Industrial Network Incidents 35 Although safety systems are extremely important, they have also been used to downplay the need for heightened security of industrial networks. However, research has shown that real consequences can occur in modeled systems. Simulations per- formed by the Sandia National Laboratories showed that simple Man-in-the-Middle (MITM) attacks could be used to change values in a control system and that a modest-scale attack on a larger bulk electric system using targeted malware (in this scenario, targeting specific control system front end processors) was able to cause significant loss of generation. 3 The European research team VIKING (Vital Infrastructure, Networks, Information and Control Systems Management) is currently investigating threats of a different sort. The Automatic Generation Control (AGC) of electric utilities oper- ates in an entirely closed loop--that is, the control process completes entirely within the logic of the SCADA system, without human intervention or control. Rather than breaching a control system through the manipulation of an HMI, VIKING's research attempts to investigate whether the manipulation of input data could alter the normal control loop functions, ultimately causing a disturbance. 4