Comment by chrisvls
8 hours ago
Sadly, the real lesson we need to learn from Battlestar Galactica is not this. They weren't saved by old software, they were saved by not having critical systems on the network unnecessarily.
Our water and power utilities need to re-watch the pilot.
To be fair, it was both. Those ships that got the recent upgrades also got trojans that Caprica Six put in the defense mainframe with Baltar's access codes.
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Why are our water and power utilities connected to the internet? Is it so that the employees controlling them can work from home? If so they are accepting too much risk relative to the benefit.
Because other replies aren't really stating it explicitly, let me add...
The water and power utilities are themselves large distributed systems. They need communications between elements just to function properly. They don't exist in a single location where people can go locally manage them in some air-gapped, offline fashion.
There is no option of not having a communication network to monitor and manage these geographically distributed elements. The question is which communication network you would use, and how you would secure it. Whether it is telephones, radio links, or people running around as messengers, it is still a communications network.
Will some "dedicated" network be any safer? If anything, I imagine the fantasy of a private network will lead to even less security. You cannot physically secure the entire signal path. You really need to treat it as untrusted and build your security on top with encryption, authentication, authorization, etc.
It makes sense to have them connected for a lot of reasons.
which reasons?
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think about a grid responding to demand. The old model (like the titanic) had a remote manager phoning the site lead who phoned the control room who phoned the engineering room.
Remote management has clear benefits, don’t be obtuse. I totally agree on the security risks, but the benefits are obvious.
I'm not seeing why it has to be connected to the internet. Make it a private, air-gapped intranet for all (or most) of the benefits of being "connected", but with no entry point for someone sitting on another continent to turn off the water.
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Sounds like a good application of mesh networks.
The point is NOT older, rather decentralized!
From a efficiency perspective centralized anything seems better at first glance, however decentralized anything just seems more resilient in the long run like nature and/or our universe.
> the real lesson we need to learn from Battlestar Galactica
It's the same lesson that we can learn from Star Trek, Star Wars, and all the other self-aggrandising lore that humanity concocts when gazing lovingly in the mirror.
There is no greater enemy than greedy, barbaric humanity itself.
They're good lessons, so why insult it? Why mock quality storytelling that makes good impressions on people?