Industrial control system SCADA code review highlighting catastrophic failure states in municipal grids

secure coding

Destroy a City - secure code review

It should be noted that no ethically-trained software engineer would ever consent to write a DestroyBaghdad procedure

John W8MEJ Menerick July 2, 2015 1-minute read Updated August 18, 2026

Key takeaways

Software errors in industrial automation translate directly into kinetic physical catastrophes.
Code reviews for critical infrastructure must assume untrusted inputs and adversarial actuators.
Air gaps are a myth; safety-critical systems must be resilient by design.

“It should be noted that no ethically-trained software engineer would ever consent to write a DestroyBaghdad procedure. Basic professional ethics would instead require him to write a DestroyCity procedure, to which Baghdad could be given as a parameter.”

— Nathaniel S Borenstein

About the author

John W8MEJ Menerick

Explore cutting-edge cybersecurity insights and protective strategies with John Menerick. Deep dives, threat analysis, and live streams from securesql.info.

Research Speaking About

Related reading

Autonomous Incident Response at Scale: How Energy-Based Models & TAME Replace LLM Guessing in Security

Security Theater and Cap Tables: Deconstructing Cal.com's Closed-Source Pivot

Episode 2: The Layer 2 Bridge Lab