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Depending on the industry, a lot of your tools might not just be Windows only but also tied to an old (and possibly unsupported in the case of XP) version. This
by akiselev 10y ago
Depending on the industry, a lot of your tools might not just be Windows only but also tied to an old (and possibly unsupported in the case of XP) version. This is endemic to any industry involving capital equipment like machining centers or biotech lab equipment that have serviceable lifetimes measured in the decades. A decade ago this wasn't really a problem because this equipment was isolated but now with industrial IoT and modern IT networks they're becoming more and more vulnerable.
One mom and pop machine shop I ordered from got tired of using USB drives to haul CAD files and machining instructions between systems so they started using Google Apps with Drive as the sharing mechanism. In order to do that, they had to hook up several 10 year old Windows XP machines to the internet and within weeks they got hit by the blaster worm or some other pre-SP1 virus. That cost them weeks of machine time on their older CNCs and hundreds of man hours doing incident reports for their bigger clients like the defense contractors. The situation in the clinical biotech companies I worked at was never that bad because of HIPPA compliance and more focus on networked services like lab databases but still atrocious. So much of our industrial infrastructure is built on a house of cards.
- jkimmel 10y ago> The situation in the clinical biotech companies I worked at was never that bad because of HIPPA compliance and more focus on networked services like lab databases but still atrocious. I can attest that academic biotech labs are still pretty atrocious, for the reasons you mention. Windows XP (or super old OS X installs, pre 10.5) are pretty common on non-networked machines that function as appliances. It's not uncommon to hear about a machine controlling a $X00,000 device being compromised by malware that road in on a USB drive, despite the air gapping. Sometimes I feel that it would be better for vendors to use a super minimal Linux distribution for each of these workstations that basically function as an appliance. Not only could the vendor reduce the attack surface for any potential malware exposure, but the one-off nature of the distro and small overall number of workstations would provide a minimal incentive for malware authors to target.