Sorry, it was a busy day. I was agreeing with everyone else here. The move fast and break things attitude is one we can't afford when building control systems for critical infrastructure. I used to work in big tech, and if I pushed an update that didn't work or wasn't tested properly, the worst thing that could happen was we revert the change and there's a minor inconvenience to a user. If Facebook goes down for an hour, the company loses money, some advertisers get mad, and their users get frustrated. If an industrial Siemens SCADA operation goes down for an hour, the best case is the operation (be it a factory, airport, wastewater plant, etc.) shuts down for an hour. The worst case is people get sick or die.
It sounds dramatic but every update or change to the system rocks the boat and exposes it to a whole new tranche of dangers. So we spend most of our time observing. There's no such thing as a casual QoL update in SCADA.
I think for the big players, it often is, my impression is the more systemic risk is smaller players (like very local utilities) these are sometimes run by very unserious people.
Most SCADA systems date from the 1970s and a lot of them don’t really think about network security or even have a concept of it. So, they don’t think about the consequences of connecting it to the Internet for remote access. It’s just a feature they want.
Sorry, it was a busy day. I was agreeing with everyone else here. The move fast and break things attitude is one we can't afford when building control systems for critical infrastructure. I used to work in big tech, and if I pushed an update that didn't work or wasn't tested properly, the worst thing that could happen was we revert the change and there's a minor inconvenience to a user. If Facebook goes down for an hour, the company loses money, some advertisers get mad, and their users get frustrated. If an industrial Siemens SCADA operation goes down for an hour, the best case is the operation (be it a factory, airport, wastewater plant, etc.) shuts down for an hour. The worst case is people get sick or die.
It sounds dramatic but every update or change to the system rocks the boat and exposes it to a whole new tranche of dangers. So we spend most of our time observing. There's no such thing as a casual QoL update in SCADA.
What I don’t get is, if it’s so critical, why wasn’t the bare minimum done to isolate the hardware from the Internet At Large?
I think for the big players, it often is, my impression is the more systemic risk is smaller players (like very local utilities) these are sometimes run by very unserious people.
Most SCADA systems date from the 1970s and a lot of them don’t really think about network security or even have a concept of it. So, they don’t think about the consequences of connecting it to the Internet for remote access. It’s just a feature they want.