Comment by InsidiousWombat
4 hours ago
I find the case of having enough money to put all of that on internet and centralize management and not having enough of it to set up a rudimentary VPN unlikely. The money is not the reason.
Those systems are not cheap. It's not the case of lacking few hundred bucks to put it between a VPN box.
It is simply just "well, we weren't hacked before, why change?". Back when those were installed that was just not in the field of view and most those people worried about is changing default password.
And there is another case for industrial equipment, even if it is out of support, what you gonna do, trash a machine because of it ? No, it will be running till it falls apart or it will be more cost effective to replace.
> But I'd setup Tailscale and-- would you, the grocery store manager running on 3% margin, really? What if you're part of a chain and it's centrally controlled elsewhere, like all the other decade-old tech you use but have to call and wait for a dispatched tech to handle?
You either pay small cost now, or bigger cost when someone finds out. So, yes, really. We live in times where you no longer have to pay $500+ for enterprise grade VPN box, you can do very acceptable security wise solutions on cheap hardware or on literally "any old piece of junk"
>Those systems are not cheap.
That's part of the problem. By the time the fully analog original equipment needed replacement, the only commercial replacements available already had been built for network access for quite a number of years while none of the purchasing people were keeping up-to-date with it.
Even the less-massive models are so expensive that the vendors can't fail to include the latest technology whether anybody is using it yet or not, because future. These things don't fly off the shelf very often either and lots of analog leaders "just" used temporary consultants to bolt on some networking without ever gaining any unwanted digital headaches and accompanying expertise.
Along with the routers of the 1990's, inexperienced users were supposed to be able to just connect it and have it work.
Lots of them never connected it to the web or any other network, or maybe years later when there should have been orders of magnitude more security considerations they finally plugged in a long enough ethernet cable and it just worked as they always expected it to once the future got here.
It hasn't been that many decades, conventional (lack of) wisdom is it certainly shouldn't take more effort to install than an analog unit would have required.
That was expensive enough.