🚨https://nitter.poast.org/search?q=%23BREAKING: The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has sent out a warning that cyberattacks against water utilities are becoming more frequent and severe, urging immediate steps to protect the nation's drinking water from future attacks
@ademan @rawsalerts How do you outsource the tech work for half the country's water supply to one guy in Montana if you do that?
It's tough. People who know what theyre doing want an air gap, but:
1. Suits really want access to information about the process right fucking now so you need at least a dmz at your head office, and
2. Municipal water systems tend to be spread out over miles and miles and so to get connectivity for example to a lift station you need all kinds of infrastructure to connect between everything or you use a public internet connection at a fraction of the price.
Municipal water budgets, in spite of how crazy expensive municipal water is, don't tend to be that high and so if they can save some money by doing things the easier way they will.
Of course, that doesn't mean that everyone needs to throw their plcs directly on the public internet. At the very least, there's absolutely no reason why those remote sites can't be connecting back to the main plant network using vpns that are at least several orders of magnitude more secure than the systems they'd be protecting.
1. Suits really want access to information about the process right fucking now so you need at least a dmz at your head office, and
2. Municipal water systems tend to be spread out over miles and miles and so to get connectivity for example to a lift station you need all kinds of infrastructure to connect between everything or you use a public internet connection at a fraction of the price.
Municipal water budgets, in spite of how crazy expensive municipal water is, don't tend to be that high and so if they can save some money by doing things the easier way they will.
Of course, that doesn't mean that everyone needs to throw their plcs directly on the public internet. At the very least, there's absolutely no reason why those remote sites can't be connecting back to the main plant network using vpns that are at least several orders of magnitude more secure than the systems they'd be protecting.
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That’s a good point, I wasn’t really thinking about the need to coordinate multiple sites.
Cell carriers do offer private APNs, but I have no idea how pricey it is, and at the end of the day it’s probably not much (if at all) better than VPNs over public internet anyway.
@rawsalerts Welcome to Mexico, bitches. Except you can't just get a carboy of purified drinking water delivered to your door for a dollar.
This is the equivalent to sayig "get the Military off the internet, its too dangerous!" Then signing up to Facebook to attend the town-hall which is somehow OK to be in a far worse place than the "internet".
@rawsalerts We’re poisoning the water for your safety. We’re limiting your water for your safety. If you die of dehydration, it’s for your safety. No one is cyber attacking them. All utilities will be part of your social credit score, even though you’re paying for it.