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There needs to be a law that all nuclear and nuclear-adjacent facilities have no connection to the Internet. The fact it's allowed is unbelievable.
by reenorap 1y ago
There needs to be a law that all nuclear and nuclear-adjacent facilities have no connection to the Internet. The fact it's allowed is unbelievable.
- fujigawa 1y agoIt's believable when the industry has pivoted to pushing SaaS garbage in every place imaginable to the point that on-prem solutions don't exist anymore. Do you expect them to not use email either? Remember, the industry told us we're in a 'zero trust' world now. The network perimeter is an anachronism. OTOH you know damn well they keep the important stuff airgapped, in which case the title (and your predictable reaction) is just fanning the flames. It could very well be they 'breached' the receptionist's PC she uses to browse Facebook to pass the time.
- IAmBroom 1y agoI have some sad news for you, about the realities of "airgapped security" IRL. It starts with military officers using the hallway photocopiers for secure documents, and ends with TS docs stored in a Florida hotel's restroom.
- ninalanyon 1y agoEmail is much easier to secure. > receptionist's PC she uses to browse Facebook to pass the time. Why does 'her' PC have access to the internet?
- tcoff91 1y agoWasn't the internet literally created by the military for military comms? The decentralized routing was in part to ensure that comms could survive some areas being taken out by nuclear weapons.
- SoftTalker 1y agoAs the effect of yesterday's AWS event demonstrates, the major Amazon, Microsoft, and Google data centers are surely top tier targets in every adversary's war plans. The decentralized internet is less of a reality today than it was years ago.
- diggan 1y agoDon't we have more internet submarine cables and less single points of failure in our internet infrastructure today than years ago? If so, shouldn't that make it easier to route around failures? The web though I agree isn't very decentralized.
- SoftTalker 1y agoMaybe yes in that regard. But in the past, most organizations ran their own mail and web servers. Software supporting the business ran on-prem. Now they use Google or Azure or AWS. So business and civilian usage, at least, seem more vulnerable now.
- HippyTed 1y agoWe sacrificed resillience for effeciency. Now things are much more fragile and liable to exploitation.
- Root_Denied 1y agoConsidering that the AWS outage took out a lot of lines of communication (email, video, chat systems) for both commercial and government entities, I'd say that US-East-1 is a pretty big single point of failure. Even if it didn't result in infrastructure impact directly, if there was some kind of infrastructure issue and you had delayed or unavailable communications, how would you know? How quickly could a response be mounted? There's some parts of the infrastructure that could damage themselves irreparably in the time it would take to to fix the outage or get comms routed through a backup channel - like parts of the electrical grid or water treatment plants. An attacker (read: nation-state actor) wouldn't even need to take down US-East-1, it could just take advantage of the outage. I assume (hope?) there's some kind of backup comms plan or infra in place for critical events, but I don't actually know.
- philipallstar 1y agoThe very very earliest form of some of the protocols involved it were, yes. But not really now at all. That "internet" would not be worth using.
- 1718627440 1y agoThat's fine, when all the nodes run autonomously and the internet is only used for real information sharing. What we now have is that the nodes are display control servers and all the computation and storage happens externally. That is not how it was designed by the military.
- azalemeth 1y agoWhile we're at it "and not use Microsoft products". Literally every time a story like this surfaces...
- dimitrios1 1y agoThat's more of a form of survivorship bias. Microsoft continued to maintain its lockdown on government IT and infrastructure through the decades, over the alternatives.
- Razengan 1y agoI don't think any Microsoft Surfaces were involved in this..
- BeetleB 1y ago> While we're at it "and not use Microsoft products". I'm not sure if Oracle would be better.
- KaiserPro 1y agoI mean there were also rules about non-sanctioned network connections in the pentagon, or using only sanctioned apps to discuss secrets, but thats not really been enforced recently.
- jayd16 1y agoYou mean its a bad idea to slap a Starlink dish in the same building as the nuclear football?
- boringg 1y agoWhich breach was that again?
- JumpCrisscross 1y ago> needs to be a law that all nuclear and nuclear-adjacent facilities have no connection to the Internet Why the special treatment for nuclear? Do you really think redlining a dam or storm-levee system would be less damaging? Also, turning off internet connections means less-capable remote shut shut-off. Less-responsive power plants. Fewer eyes on telemetry. We should be mindful of what is and isn't connected to the internet, and how it's firewalled and--if necessary--air gapped. That doesn't mean sprinting straight for the end zone.
- doublerabbit 1y ago> Also, turning off internet connections means less-capable remote shut shut-off. Why does it have to be remote what's wrong with it being in-house? Besides a shut-off should never be able to be triggered remotely. The same goes for digital emergency shut off buttons; all should be physical. > Less-responsive power plants. What? How is remote any more responsive than physical workers being in-house? If power-plants operated efficiently back in the 50's without internet, they should be able to now without internet.
- JumpCrisscross 1y ago> Why does it have to be remote what's wrong with it being in-house? Nothing wrong with it being in house. But having a back-up is never bad. > How is remote any more responsive than physical workers being in-house? If the on-site workers are incapacitated. It's a remote (hehe) risk. But so is foreign hackers doing anything with our nukes. > If power-plants operated efficiently back in the 50's without internet, they should be able to now without internet If you're fine paying 50s power prices again, sure, I'm sure a power company would happily run their plants retro style.
- ferguess_k 1y agoI heard that once you put up a website on the public internet, it would immediately gets attacked by all kinds of scanners or other worse things. Not sure if it's true as I'm not a web guy.
- SoftTalker 1y agoEvery public IPv4 address is port scanned multiple times a day.
- ta1243 1y agoWhich really isn't a problem, unless you're being scanned so much your bandwidth is being overwhelmed. Certainly not the case for me, despite having port 80 and 443 open
- tgv 1y agoI have a server that has a slow (5s) response to unknown pages, returns it as 200, and makes the next failing request even slower (for unauthenticated users). That seems to keep the number of requests limited. Perhaps I should just drop the connection after a certain number of requests. BTW, quite a few of these port scanners are companies that offer to scan your ports for vulnerabilities. Temu pen testing, so to speak.
- 1970-01-01 1y agoWasn't it literally designed for that specific task? As a robust C&C system during nuclear war? The fact that we're doing it wrong doesn't mean we need to pull the plug on everything. How else do you survive WWIII? https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/5432117 https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/5432117
- groby_b 1y agoYou don't. Internet or not.
- 1718627440 1y agoThat only works, if the nodes still operate just fine, without the Internet.
- hypeatei 1y ago> needs to be a law that all nuclear and nuclear-adjacent facilities have no connection to the Internet You want to make everything about a nuclear facility bespoke and subject to air-gapped drift? What about the guard booth that verifies peoples access, the receptionist who schedules meetings, and the janitor who wants to watch YouTube on his break? It seems unrealistic to lump everything that goes on at a nuclear facility under this umbrella.
- reenorap 1y agoOpening up the internet to a nuclear facility so that the janitor can watch Youtube seems preposterous. People can afford to do things slower for the sake of security. Having things typed out, verifying security via phone calls, etc like it's the 1970s seems reasonable to me. Does it really matter if things aren't fully optimized for speed and convenience in nuclear facilities?
- hypeatei 1y ago> really matter if things aren't fully optimized for speed and convenience in nuclear facilities For hiring and retaining people, yes. It's understood that the "guts" of what's happening at these facilities needs to be locked down to the max. But, for supporting roles you need to be able to bring people in off the street without 1) a bunch of specialized training on your bespoke way of doing things, and 2) making your employees less attractive on the job market. Just my opinion, though. Maybe I'm completely off base but it doesn't seem like a good idea to me long-term.
- aerostable_slug 1y agoIRL the way we do it is separating the business network (Youtube, finance people, HR, etc.) from the operational network (relays and sensors). You use data diodes to send business-critical data from the operational network to the business network. Also, the Kansas City Plant is like a watchmaker's factory, not a power plant. They make widgets and gewgaws, not literally split atoms.
- 0_____0 1y agoBeing airgapped didn't help Iran avoid Stuxnet.
- sgjohnson 1y agoThat also had a HUMINT element.
- aspenmayer 1y agoIt’s possible that the (un)timely demise of the individual involved also had a HUMINT element as well. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Olympic_Games#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Olympic_Games#Histor... > Dutch engineer Erik van Sabben allegedly infiltrated the Natanz nuclear facility on behalf of Dutch intelligence and installed equipment infected with Stuxnet. He died two weeks after the Stuxnet attack at age 36 in an apparent single-vehicle motorcycle accident in Dubai. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erik_van_Sabben https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erik_van_Sabben
- bell-cot 1y agoNo, but it made the attacker's job 10000X more difficult.
- the_af 1y agoDefense in depth is still valuable.
- aspenmayer 1y agoTo be fair, it didn’t help the rest of us avoid Stuxnet, either. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Olympic_Games#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Olympic_Games#Histor... > A programming error later caused the worm to spread to computers outside of Natanz. When an engineer "left Natanz and connected [his] computer to the Internet, the American- and Israeli-made bug failed to recognize that its environment had changed." The code replicated on the Internet and was subsequently exposed for public dissemination. IT security firms Symantec and Kaspersky Lab have since examined Stuxnet. It is unclear whether the United States or Israel introduced the programming error. Also bearing mention is Flame, which is often left out when Stuxnet comes up, but which was allegedly part of the wider operation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Olympic_Games#Significance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Olympic_Games#Signif... > The Washington Post reported that Flame malware was also part of Olympic Games. https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/us-israel-developed-computer-virus-to-slow-iranian-nuclear-efforts-officials-say/2012/06/19/gJQA6xBPoV_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/us-is... | https://web.archive.org/web/20220322045917/https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/us-israel-developed-computer-virus-to-slow-iranian-nuclear-efforts-officials-say/2012/06/19/gJQA6xBPoV_story.html https://web.archive.org/web/20220322045917/https://www.washi... | https://archive.is/6hRl7 https://archive.is/6hRl7 > “We are now 100 percent sure that the Stuxnet and Flame groups worked together,” said Roel Schouwenberg, a Boston-based senior researcher with Kaspersky Lab. > The firm also determined that the Flame malware predates Stuxnet. “It looks like the Flame platform was used as a kickstarter of sorts to get the Stuxnet project going,” Schouwenberg said. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flame_(malware) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flame_(malware)
- wslh 1y agoMicrosoft could have been sold this with a special "nuclear license".
- porridgeraisin 1y agoFine, keep it on the internet. But SharePoint, seriously? A 15 year old version of nginx pointed to the ~/.ssh folder is more secure.
- bink 1y agoFrom the article: > OT cybersecurity specialists interviewed by CSO say that KCNSC’s production systems are likely air-gapped or otherwise isolated from corporate IT networks, significantly reducing the risk of direct crossover. Nevertheless, they caution against assuming such isolation guarantees safety. This was also not a nuclear facility, however. The article says it makes "non-nuclear components". In my experience auditing critical infrastructure, most facilities are "air gapped". I put that in quotes because while you can't browse the Internet from the control network(s), there are ways to exfiltrate data. The managers, engineers, regulators, and vendors need to know what is going on in real-time. Back in the day this could've been a serial port connecting two systems for a one-way feed. Now I imagine it's something far more sophisticated and probably more susceptible to abuse. As an example, you might have a collection of turbines manufactured by GE and GE needs to have real-time data coming from them for safety monitoring and maintenance. The turbines might have one connection for control traffic and another for monitoring. How to secure these vendor connections was always a debate. Btw, there are strong cybersecurity regulations around critical infrastructure. CIP-005-07 covers security perimeters. You can view them here: https://www.nerc.com/pa/Stand/Reliability%20Standards%20Complete%20Set/RSCompleteSet.pdf https://www.nerc.com/pa/Stand/Reliability%20Standards%20Comp...
- Veserv 1y agoAh yes, "likely air-gapped", what a high-confidence statement. Any competently designed air-gap must be precisely auditable and demonstrably, positively air-gapped. The only world where "likely" is a reasonable word is in reference to possible physical taps or a precise enumeration of physical access points that went unaudited, but have reliably followed safe access control/configuration procedures. Anything else is plain incompetence.
- nathanmcrae 1y agoHow do you go about positively demonstrating such a system is air-gapped?
- fintler 1y ago
- dylan604 1y agoIt is funny to read this kind of comment knowing at the same time this kind of stuff was happening while the launch codes were 0000000 or some such non-secure code. At same time, the computers in the nuclear launch facilities were still using 5.25" floppies. I did wonder how often they were loading updates from those, if ever.
- HippyTed 1y agoJust wait until these places get flooded with vibe coded stuff that even those deploying it have little understanding. What could go wrong!? Sleep well.
- schnitzelstoat 1y agoThe nuclear systems are air-gapped. So this is already the case.