Listening to SN971 Steve talks about the gateways being damaged, but the sensors likely being fine. However most of these sensors are remote programmed, using that same communications bus, and also most of them do not have any sort of login on that comms method, you just send the correct packet, and they will respond with an acknowledge, and the next bytes addressed to the device will set bitmaps internally to them, overwriting the existing info. So you could have multipurpose sensors, set up here as a pressure and temperature controller, that was say being used to run an oil refinery cracking column, now suddenly getting an update with random data, and now, instead of having to maintain a pressure say of 10 bar and 250C at the base of the column, it now get scrambled, so the input got changed from temperature measuring a K type thermocouple, to measuring millivolts instead, and switching on the heat, because you need to reach 250mV, and currently it is around 11mV input from the thermocouple assembly. Same for the pressure, changed to something different, and thus the sensor will no longer work even with a new gateway.
Output sensors can be destroyed, your valve controllers can easily be changed to maximum current limit, and then sent past the software limits, destroying the physical plant.
As to the gateways yes the flash will be destroyed, as the malware operates below wear levelling if there, erasing single pages of the flash over and over, and writing an inverse bit pattern to it, hoping that the flash will have a hard erase fault before power cycling wipes the code from RAM, though I would say the code likely keeps on writing itself again and again to the flash, and thus removes any firmware there.
Output sensors can be destroyed, your valve controllers can easily be changed to maximum current limit, and then sent past the software limits, destroying the physical plant.
As to the gateways yes the flash will be destroyed, as the malware operates below wear levelling if there, erasing single pages of the flash over and over, and writing an inverse bit pattern to it, hoping that the flash will have a hard erase fault before power cycling wipes the code from RAM, though I would say the code likely keeps on writing itself again and again to the flash, and thus removes any firmware there.
