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.

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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: [ …]

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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.

    • pianoplant@lemmy.worldEnglish
      2·
      22 hours ago

      You’re in your own VRF in the cellular ISP’s network. You typically get one or more RFC-1918 private subnets to assign IPs to your devices from. You can set strict ACLs on those devices. They have no internet access and can only communicate with each other (if you allow it) and optionally your network via carrier peering. The carrier peering is typically BGP over IPSEC or MPLS (although good old fashioned carrier hotel cross connects are also an option)

      I’m assuming you were asking a serious question and so I provided a serious answer. Hopefully you find it interesting.

      Source: I design cellular private networks for a living.

      • fubarx@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1·
        12 hours ago

        Curious… vehicles that send back telemetry and accept remote commands. I always assumed they had their own private cell networks.

        But while we’re on wireless CarPlay or Android Auto… does ALL phone traffic get routed through the car/vehicle manufacturer?