Why is control of the electrical grid accessible to the
internet?
People usually have delusions of grandeur over hackers causing a meltdown at a nuclear plant or something, but no one seems to question why the ability to control a nuclear plant needs to be hooked up to the internet.
There are people asking that question, it just doesn't get press. Because the reality is quite likely that there are solid business reasons for some access and the real problem is piss-poor security on that access [1].
So you either report on computer security details or alarmist disaster scenarios [2]. And one of those lines of reporting will sell more copies than the other.
[1] If there was no business value in access, they wouldn't have paid to install data lines. I'd imagine remote administration, monitoring and centralized reporting are quite useful, particularly when observing large swaths of the grid.
[2] Which means, yes, people tend to get caught up in infeasible scenarios like hackers causing nuclear meltdowns. But the unlikelihood of those types of catastrophes does not mean that there are no catastrophes that can be caused by compromised infrastructure control machines.
Comments
I think that major question here is:
People usually have delusions of grandeur over hackers causing a meltdown at a nuclear plant or something, but no one seems to question why the ability to control a nuclear plant needs to be hooked up to the internet.I'd agree, but disagree.
There are people asking that question, it just doesn't get press. Because the reality is quite likely that there are solid business reasons for some access and the real problem is piss-poor security on that access [1].
So you either report on computer security details or alarmist disaster scenarios [2]. And one of those lines of reporting will sell more copies than the other.
[1] If there was no business value in access, they wouldn't have paid to install data lines. I'd imagine remote administration, monitoring and centralized reporting are quite useful, particularly when observing large swaths of the grid.
[2] Which means, yes, people tend to get caught up in infeasible scenarios like hackers causing nuclear meltdowns. But the unlikelihood of those types of catastrophes does not mean that there are no catastrophes that can be caused by compromised infrastructure control machines.