CISA Alert: Water Sector PLC Targeting(censys.com) |
CISA Alert: Water Sector PLC Targeting(censys.com) |
Describe the network security of the industrial automation industry and their customers in a single statement. Lol.
CISA and its predecessors have been warning utility operators about critical infrastructure vulnerabilities for what, 15 years at this point? That goes back to the first Obama administration.
Yet here we are in 2026 and these utilities are still connecting these things to the raw Internet with default passwords. You cross a threshold where you're being deliberately careless.
When you are putting more effort into securing your Plex server on your home network then public utilities are taking on machinery that dumps chemicals into the local water, something is not right and finger-pointing isn't going to fix it.
Public sector has always paid low. But the problem is widespread, almost universal, and they've had a 15 year head start of the federal government telling them to get their shit together.
At some point it just became standard industry practice is my guess.
The one and only exception is the military, because lives are literally on the line in a way that is not at all abstract.
I work with PLCs. Default passwords of not, the idea that such weakly secure devices are being made accessible from the public internet boggles my mind.
> finger-pointing isn't going to fix it.
Your entire comment was finger pointing…
"I think Minnesota is behind it."
The first quote makes it the state's responsibility to secure local water systems, which I'm not sure that it is. The second makes it at least sound like the state of Minnesota is the entity running the attack on local water systems within their state, which is off in paranoid conspiracy territory.
Trump was absolutely wrong.
Paying skilled people highly does actually incentivize people to do better work, especially if they are actually embedded into the community they are essentially working for. If being a civil servant was as "glorious" as being a techie is SF there would be a very different attitude around the work.
The people who climb to the top aren’t the ones who took a risk and got the reward. Quite the opposite, they’re the ones who learned to play the game and didn’t upset the power structure by rocking the boat. No one is going to tell the emperor he has no clothes when the path to power is political and has no grounding in reality.
Highly conscientious, intrinsically motivated people will do the right thing in any environment. And those people don’t last long in political/bureaucratic environments where the incentives are misaligned.