CISA released an urgent message warning water utilities to disconnect their logic controllers from the internet in the face of rising cyberattacks.
The hacks target internet-facing programmable logic controllers (PLCs) that control equipment and allow machinery to communicate. They monitor and control the water pressure, chemical dosing, and other factors to ensure the water is safe.
Many of the PLCs are apparently open to the internet and use default credentials, allowing a remote attacker to easily take them over.
I assume it is this CISA: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cybersecurity_and_Infrastructure_Security_Agency
It’s called paying people to watch the systems during off-hours. It’s often way cheaper than setting up firewalls, setting up alerts, maintaining patches, paying a VPN company to manage connections, paying another company to handle authentication, and so on. Security constraints are getting so bad at my office I’m seriously thinking of how we can do more things with pen and paper.
The things you mentioned probably aren’t the problem. It’s not hard or expensive to setup secure remote access for systems.
The real problem is that a lot of this very expensive and very specific infrastructure equipment is also very old, and frequently does not support newer and more secure protocols.
Source : I’ve been trying to get gas generators to fire off email alerts using modern authentication with conditional access for about a week now.
Security constraints are so bad at home I want to just buy paper books or go to library.