4 ms·
Why would a power plant system be exposed to internet in the first place
by sajithdilshan 2mo ago
Why would a power plant system be exposed to internet in the first place
- Gys 2mo agoTo enable work from home?
- goda90 2mo agoI would hope critical infrastructure would have someone on site 24/7. The Internet could go out, roads blocked, and weather too dangerous for a helicopter and you'd still want power to flow. If people want to work remotely, they could have a human-bridged air gap where change instructions are followed by someone on-site.
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- toast0 2mo agoI don't know about power plants, but for critical water infrastructure, there's usually not even a building for someone to sit in 24/7 and at least 99% of the time there would be nothing for them to do.
- goda90 2mo agoMaybe we bring back the "lighthouse keeper" type jobs for remote infrastructure
- pjc50 2mo agoMore likely windows updates. Serious answer: there's a big plan to network everything for metrology purposes. At the very least feeding real time frequency, voltage and phase information from every point of interest on the grid into a big dashboard.
- dreamcompiler 2mo agoIt's likely that much of this stuff is still running on Windows XP which doesn't even receive updates. But of course it's still exposed to the internet.
- wongarsu 2mo agoThere are plenty of reports that this happens and at least as of a couple years ago wasn't even that uncommon. Including CCC talks. People want to do remote maintenance, and apparently not everyone has a good enough internal IT to put this traffic on a VPN
- ndsipa_pomu 2mo agoI find it difficult to believe that a power plant doesn't have enough resources to employ at least one person who could implement a VPN - even if it's just some cousin of a senior manager.
- tsimionescu 2mo agoA VPN is not some foolproof system that guarantees you can't be hacked. If you're connected to the internet, people can probe your systems. Heck, Stuxnet proved they can do it even if you aren't.
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- seydor 2mo agoDRM license verification
- ImHereToVote 2mo agoOfc. For the Stuxnet vulnerability.
- tsimionescu 2mo agoBecause power plants need to coordinate to serve the grid, and there is currently a single Interconnected Network of computers out there. Would it be a good idea to create a secondary network for power control and similar critical functions, completely isolated from the internet and from any outside countries? Perhaps - but it doesn't even seem to be on the horizon for now.
- croes 2mo agoYou mean the companies that laid power lines across the country are too dumb/lazy/cheap to also lay some network cables?
- tsimionescu 2mo agoIt's much more than cables. You'd need an entire separate internet - ISPs, BGP, DNS, TLS PKI infrastructure, and probably many others. You'd also still need to very carefully keep this separate, as simply connecting an Internet and a "UK Power Plant Internet v2" cable into the same router or even laptop might invalidate all of the isolation you spent time building. Which is itself a losing battle, given that you need everyone's house to also be connected to this network. You, of course, then also need to ensure redundancy on this "UK Power Plant Internet v2", as you don't want to have a single point of failure such that a single router or cable somewhere being interrupted would create a network partition. And again, there is simply no one even considering this. All of the work going into smart grid coordination (strictly necessary for incorporating a large amount of renewable power generation in the grid) is 100% designed to work on top of the public Internet.