It’s been a really bad month (and year) for OT cybersecurity. From a wave of new, high-impact vulnerabilities, to attacks on supermarket refrigerators, to attacks on blood banks, we’ve …

Over the last ten years, we’ve lived through the rapid adoption of remote connectivity in industrial environments around the world.

[…]

Now that we understand the chaos of connectivity in modern industrial environments, we can talk about what’s getting hacked right now, and why. Why water? Why refrigerators?

A few unfortunate, incredibly predictable factors have led us here, and my colleagues and I have been screaming about them for years: [ …]

[…]

Fixing the vulnerability isn’t easy, even if the organisation is aware of it. Industrial systems have long lifecycles, sometimes 10 to 30 years. They’re engineered and tested by the OEM to work in a very specific technology stack and topology. Any alteration can, at best, disrupt the process and, at worst, lead to injury or death. Either outcome can be far more damaging than a casual hacker. Because of these lifecycles, and the inability to replace systems, I still deal with Windows 2000, CE, and XP every week. They can’t be removed from production or modified without express authorisation from the OEM and engineers, plus a significant outage and testing window.

  • Roguelazer@lemmy.worldEnglish
    9·
    14 hours ago

    Yes, the choice to cut labor and feed bloated corporate profits by replacing local tech support with offshored MSPs is definitely the root of it. I think everyone knows that and the outrage is because everyone whose job title doesn’t include the word “Chief” realizes its phenomenally stupid to take all the slack capacity out of our economy in order to goose stocks an extra 0.5%. I’m not convinced the author of this article quite realizes how much everyone with two eyes can see that the last three decades of “conventional business best practices” have been toxic and corrosive and how big of a generational project it will be to dig us out of worshipping “just in time” production and “ultra-lean” (read: understaffed) workplaces.

    • Schemen110676@lemmy.mlEnglish
      2·
      4 hours ago

      Thats not entirely true… there are some good arguments for just in time and lean production.

      And mostly arent cost.

      A lot has to do with understanding what is required and work towards that goal and only that goal.