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Comment by throwawaycanada | Hacker News Reader

When will people learn that industrial control systems can't ever be safely connected to the internet.

That barrier should be much higher for networking devices imho; aviation, container ships, cruise ships, healthcare controller systems, utility controller systems, factory controller systems, parts of banking, parts of payments, all of these And More should not be connected to the internet for their critical operations.

I did a project for an 'embedded' controller software house a long time ago and asked why they used Windows (which was just quite hackable at the time and I wouldn't use it today for critical operations but that might just be because it used to be so bad at a time when I mostly used Solaris which was unbreakable compared) and why it was connected to the internet; answer was obvious; software for Win was easier to outsource to far away countries (in NL you find great engineers but costly and you cannot fire them easily; this company traded quality to be able to do it cheap and be able to do it project basis) and networking because it's too expensive to go to the client and update the software manually. So it was just always connected. The first versions where directly on the internet, the latter versions via a gateway computer but it was both pretty easy to get into. Cannot imagine other reasons to have it open from the outside besides that? Just convenience of maintenance.

For industrial machines it's also becoming common to have them networked and open so that you can gather data about everything. Watch the temperatures of the injection molding machine and how long it's taking to do it's job. If things change then you know that parts need replacing or it's getting ready to fail. This lets you do more runs, faster, without having to take down for maintenance at intervals rather than when it's needed. That both increases reliability (early failures can be caught) and how much you can produce before needing to take it offline (since you can go longer knowing the machine is performing identically).

Ofcourse, and that's a good thing, but networked doesn't have to be the internet. Why have that connected to the internet? And not some setup where it is physically or at least reasonably physically seperated. Those values would also be fine on the LAN. Not networked is safer than networked, but connecting them to the actual internet (via usually not more than some basic router) is the other extreme.

My thoughts exactly. Just use an IPsec VPN through to the monitoring centre if it must be monitored. No need to have listening ports on the Internet. It's not exactly network engineering black magic. I imagine what happened is that it was compromised by phishing on an unprotected host. In that case the control systems should be air-gapped from Joe Blog's in accounting PC.

Definitely agree, I've never understood why so many seem to end up connected to the internet at large, or through some easy to pass through gap. Even before Stuxnet it never quite made sense, and post stuxnet it's hard to argue that it's not negligent to have a setup like that. The only thing I can assume is that because having it as a separate lan that's not routed to the internet (arguments about vlans being sufficient, etc are a different discussion) would cost more in both hardware and maintenance.

> When will people learn that industrial control systems can't ever be safely connected to the internet.

When a disaster happens.

Politics as usual, and it's not the politicians fault (who are mostly limited by the whims of public opinion), but that there won't be enough political momentum for action until there's a disaster. The fault, like most things in politics, is of human nature.

It's unnatural for large groups of people to be motivated to take serious preventive action against something that has never happened before and has been up to then only a theoretical concern for experts.

The problem is that these systems produce business data that has to be a analyzed and used (think maintenance planning). So it must at least make it somehow to the office network. This is where the issue finds its root because once you create this link, it becomes indirectly possible to reach the Internet much more easily.

Not going to happen. Too much benefit for monitoring and management of the systems and not enough downsides.

Security education and practices need to be taken more seriously by executives.

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