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126

CISA Releases Guidance Urging Water Treatment Facilities to Disconnect Equipment From the Internet (www.privacyguides.org)

submitted 3 hours ago by new_otters_raft@piefed.ca to c/technology@lemmy.world

16 comments fedilink hide all child comments

CISA released an urgent message warning water utilities to disconnect their logic controllers from the internet in the face of rising cyberattacks.

The hacks target internet-facing programmable logic controllers (PLCs) that control equipment and allow machinery to communicate. They monitor and control the water pressure, chemical dosing, and other factors to ensure the water is safe.

Many of the PLCs are apparently open to the internet and use default credentials, allowing a remote attacker to easily take them over.

I assume it is this CISA: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cybersecurity_and_Infrastructure_Security_Agency

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[–] Godort@lemmy.ca 27 points 2 hours ago* (last edited 2 hours ago) (2 children)

It usually happens in 2 steps.

First step is that everything gets connected to the LAN and you can only access the PLC network from within the building's network. Then some time later, management finds out that keeping someone on-call to go out costs a fortune, so they request that access be made so they can make the change from anywhere.

The IT team argues security, but no new hardware can be provisioned and a developing a new process is too hard. Then the magical phrase is uttered: "Just make it work". So IT punches a hole in the firewall, adds a NAT rule, and job done.

[–] Carl@anarchist.nexus 10 points 1 hour ago

Literally this. It starts with “everything needs to be on an air gapped LAN so we can control it.” And then suddenly that air gapped LAN isn’t air gapped, because someone got tired of paying the call-out fee every time the on-call person had to drive to the site to push a few buttons on a keyboard. But figuring out a proper VPN (or at least a reverse proxy with access control) was too difficult or expensive, (management thinks the point is to save money on call out fees, not spend money on proper hardware) so they just poked a bunch of port-forwarded holes in the firewall and called it a day.

[–] sylver_dragon@lemmy.world 16 points 2 hours ago (1 children)

Sadly yes, this is exactly what happens. And it ends up being IT holding the bag at the end, with the managers having long since cashed out their stock options and left.

[–] blargh513@sh.itjust.works 1 points 40 minutes ago

"Well, we just bought this new monitoring platform from my cousin's company and they need access to it. No, their platform doesn't support any real secure protocols and won't route over a VPN, it needs to be on the same subnet as the devices. Ok, then just open all ports to the network so they can connect. No, they don't know what port or protocol, it also runs out of my cousin's house so it's on a dynamic IP so you can't create some type of access rule for it. Just put an any/any rule in and it's good. What do you mean we already have a monitoring platform? Well, this one is better!"