After the pipeline got shot down, it got me thinking about our electrical grid. If they managed to sit it down for just a few weeks, the damage and loss of life would be catastrophic. Why on earth are these systems even accessable to anyone outside this country?
In: Engineering
i know atleast 3 Factories in Germany you can access the PLC from the Internet for remote Maintenance.
also i do know that there are some Control Computers in the local Coal Power Plant and the local Water Treatment Plant are connected at certain Times for routine maintenance since i worked in a Factory that produced alot of waste Water so we had a steady connection and we use the same Coal Unloading Station
I work on a closed network, which is a network that’s not connected to the internet for security reasons. My work computer at my desk can connect to my coworkers’ work computers within the same room, and nothing else. I have a separate computer at my desk that I use to access the internet.
The main reason not to use them, even for systems that don’t need internet access to fulfill their purpose, is that closed networks are a pain in the butt if information needs to leave the building at all, and are less than ideal to work with even in the best situations. Working from home is difficult or impossible, heck, working from the next room over is impossible if there’s not an Ethernet cord connected to the network running into the room.
LOL that’s fucking nothing. There’s a box I pass by everyday on the highway when I go to work that controls the entire WECC electrical grid. It is locked behind a chainwire fence and a padlock. All I need is some snippers and I could flip a switch shutting down power for every person in British Columbia, Alberta, Washington, Oregon, Montana, Colorado, Wyoming, New Mexico, Arizona, Utah, Nevada, California, and parts of Baja California, Texas, South Dakota, and Nebraska. At least 150 million people. You remember that guy who blew up an RV on Christmas in Nashville? He made everyone in Dixie lose their internet and cellphone services for nearly a week. Russia hacked a pipeline and made everyone go without gasoline for around the same amount of time. The US is weak and vulnerable. Our infrastructure is dated at best. Our nukes run on floppy disks. Any mod-kitty or terrorist group with a membership above 2 could literally destroy the world or at the very least destroy every luxury and commodity necessary for our civilization to exist as it does now with a community college course in programming. You are foolish not to be a tinfoil hat prepper with a fallout shelter straight out of the creative minds of Interplay Entertainment.
The Internet is ubiquitous. It is cheap and accessible.
As a modern electrical grid operator, you want to balance the distribution as best possible (that’s the job of the grid). That requires detailed real-time data on energy production and consumption.
The biggest consumers are in the industries. They too don’t want to spend too much money if they don’t have to.
So, to integrate them into your data systems, you would use the cheapest data transfer available to both. And thus you just use the Internet.
This is talked about on the JRE podcast with the ex cia dude a few weeks back
He talks about how the infrastructure isn’t even built to withstand a physical attack let alone a cyber attack
You can walk up to a substation and piss on it, he claimed (paraphrasing). There’s nothing stopping people from physically manipulating a substation besides some padlocks, chain link fence, and barbed wire.
The first cyber attack to shut down the US grid(s) will cause a lot of harm and many deaths, just like the grid failure in Texas.
It’s scary to think about where the world is headed and the lack of regulation.
Its because legacy systems created by aged software developers. The most popular scada software are poorly developed, written in ancient languages, have memory leaks and poor error handling, and it runs on old bloated versions of Windows which are not well suited for stability.
So remote access for on-call support to fix issues becomes a requirement, and given the severity of the the pipeline ceasing operation we dont want to wait for people to go on-site to fix things.
Cybersecurity in a vacuum with spherical frictionless OS is awesome but in a real production environment things get fuzzy. To give you an idea, the fuzziness is so severe that there’s a whole line of work called 2nd line security which was invented almost entirely to deal with the most important and devastating problem plaguing the industry: how to have the MBA pukes in “the business” understand why security isnt just some dick-waving excercise by nerds with a hard-on for *tightly* closed port ranges, while at the same time explaning to the dick-waving nerds that we run a business and that’s what pays for their fancy toys and consulting hours.
IT security is a constant balancing act between these two polar opposites. Want to air-gap a system to prevent cyber-attacks? Here’s a shopping list of processes that are currently being done through APIs and whatnot but will now have to be entered manually through a dedicated workstation. Need to put your server in the DMZ because reasons? Have this nice risk assessment of how long it’s going to take until some russian pwns your little box, and what you’re going to lose; please sign off on the risk.
It’s a never-ending dance to try and figure out the correct security posture, based on your risk appetite, your actual threat profile, and how much Flak your are willing to catch from your production teams and possibly your management (protip: get *them* on board first, preferably through a dark ritual of blood and flesh), as well as the eternal sinews of war (money). Once you got that figured out, you stick to it. And if they’re not happy they can suck on it till they fucking chew it with their sphincter because there isnt a single point in the scale that will make most of them or any of them happy, and the whole point of the exercise is to have an agreement on where the security stance will be so that you have a plan to follow and something to show when the shit hits the fan and people start pointing fingers: “See, we knew that there were risks, they were estimated to be so and so, and we agreed that they would be accepted/mitigated/transfered so that we can remain competitive and grow our business, and our auditors thought it was cool. Blow me.”
And sometimes that involves leaving the billing system accessible from the internet, because someone fucked up and missed out on the process of mapping out critical system dependencies and leaving a glaring hole in their Incident response and business continuity scenarios. Oh we havent talked about that yet? I could write another paragraph on that but id rather just tell you to check that your fcking backups are kosher over-write proof because in the end that’s your lifeline.
Stupidity and short sightedness from people paid to be smart and forward thinking. And sometimes politics.
I worked at such a site, I strongly argued against connecting to the Internet or at least maintaining and air gap.
But Politics intervened, there was political capital and point scoring to be made and so the decision was made to connect everything to the Internet.
Cost eficiency, it is much cheaper, safer, and faster to communicate via any online method rather than doing it through any of the older ways such as phone or maile, since mail can be intercepted and phone lines can be tapped into easily.
The problem does not come whether the internet is safe or not for any company but rather to a shortage of people that work cybersecurity.
Note that it was a FINANCIAL decision by the company management to shut down the pipeline NOT AN OPERATIONAL hack of the pipeline equipment itself.
The pipeline was shut down by the management of the company. The hackers did NOT directly take control of any pipeline operations and actually shut down the pipeline. I don’t recall the exact show/segment, but NPR had a very informative interview about this incident describing the events and that the management shutdown the pipeline due to the economic risk of losing millions/billions of dollars if they continued to operate while they didn’t have control of the data that the hackers managed to control.
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