Comment by lazide
5 hours ago
It will typically require some kind of network. And the person managing it will need access to that network.
It’s hard running that type of network securely, and costly to run it alongside a normal internet connection.
Cheaper to just use the internet connection and squint a bit at ‘securely’.
Is it really that hard to isolate some devices from the internet on an existing network?
They are all being sold on the idea of granting external access to a cloud application so that a third-party contractor can know when the system goes into disarray and pay for one less maintenance guy's salary.
Could the same thing be done with SMTP way more securely than opening up your firewall to some random AWS EC2 instance? Yeah no doubt.
Do you think grocery retail execs actually understand computers past Microsoft Word and Excel? I report to one, they can barely listen to me say the word WAN failover.
Like all things in IT, experience is the best teacher. Organizations will fail to invest in their technology, security included, and only then will the execs start to trust that the wizards in the backroom are telling them truths instead of asking for new toys - if they're lucky enough to still be the same exec that heard they should take security seriously before the Bad Thing happened.
In that case it's just a tradeoff between convenience and security, it isn't because it would be too technically difficult to isolate the systems. Whoever installed them could isolate them if there was no reason for them to be connected to the internet. I doubt most grocery store managers understand the precise engineering behind their freezers either, but they still buy them.
Very likely they were sold on these internet-connected systems without being told about the drawbacks, which is sad.
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