Sadly, the real lesson we need to learn from Battlestar Galactica is not this. They weren't saved by old software, they were saved by not having critical systems on the network unnecessarily.
Our water and power utilities need to re-watch the pilot.
To be fair, it was both. Those ships that got the recent upgrades also got trojans that Caprica Six put in the defense mainframe with Baltar's access codes.
Why are our water and power utilities connected to the internet? Is it so that the employees controlling them can work from home? If so they are accepting too much risk relative to the benefit.
think about a grid responding to demand. The old model (like the titanic) had a remote manager phoning the site lead who phoned the control room who phoned the engineering room.
Remote management has clear benefits, don’t be obtuse. I totally agree on the security risks, but the benefits are obvious.
I'm not seeing why it has to be connected to the internet. Make it a private, air-gapped intranet for all (or most) of the benefits of being "connected", but with no entry point for someone sitting on another continent to turn off the water.
I’m glad you raised this point. What are some of the better VPNs you’ve seen for secure industrial .
I asked because of books I had read about the bad ones, where unsecured industrial control protocols were exposed wirelessly , or via vpns. And I’ve been curious if any good ones are out there .
Are you talking about the media layer or the application layer? What would be the alternative to using the internet media layer? Every utility running their own private media ? So a duplicate network of media, as broad physically as the internet, that’s not connected to the internet? That hackers could tap into, and with poorer security, because it wouldn’t be constantly probed.
Because other replies aren't really stating it explicitly, let me add...
The water and power utilities are themselves large distributed systems. They need communications between elements just to function properly. They don't exist in a single location where people can go locally manage them in some air-gapped, offline fashion.
There is no option of not having a communication network to monitor and manage these geographically distributed elements. The question is which communication network you would use, and how you would secure it. Whether it is telephones, radio links, or people running around as messengers, it is still a communications network.
Will some "dedicated" network be any safer? If anything, I imagine the fantasy of a private network will lead to even less security. You cannot physically secure the entire signal path. You really need to treat it as untrusted and build your security on top with encryption, authentication, authorization, etc.
> the real lesson we need to learn from Battlestar Galactica
It's the same lesson that we can learn from Star Trek, Star Wars, and all the other self-aggrandising lore that humanity concocts when gazing lovingly in the mirror.
There is no greater enemy than greedy, barbaric humanity itself.
It's incredible how far back the surveillance state goes - GSM mobile phones have an IMEI number that's tied to the handset - and the SIM is tied to the subscriber, and your phone broadcasts imei to neighboring towers constantly.
I haven't really gotten really into this, but from what I can tell, anything that has to do with mobile phones is strictly worse in terms of anonimity than Wifi.
At least anything that ties a Wifi connection to you you can change in an OS setting, but if you get into faking IMEI/SIM stuff, that can very quickly get you charged with an actual crime.
One of the things about mobile phone is that there's 2 OSes on the phone: one that handles the phone stuff and the other that you as a user actually interact with. What's really scary about it is that the OS we do not think about is often licensed to the manufacturer (Apple, Samsung, etc.), closed-source, and dated. There's a lot of security firms that sell fake cell towers to law enforcement and governments and that gives them access to all of the data you send over the network. In older formats like 2G there was no encryption on anything sent over the wire.
If you dig into the fake cell tower rabbit hole you'll find what you're talking about to be an even worse problem.
Doesn't the whole SIM architecture exist so that phones don't have to be trusted? I believe IMEI can be anything in practice, so long that there isn't a blatant duplicate nearby, a bit like Ethernet MAC address. I don't know if it's legal but phone nerds seem to be editing IMEI all the time for non-Apple phones as well, using those leaked vendor tools.
This seems largely to be about security by obscurity.
I was hoping it was gonna be about how our modern practices are making things less secure.
For instance, we claim we need to be able to rapidly update clients so that we can patch security vulnerabilities as they are discovered (often without involving the user at all). And there are a lot of companies that have an incentive to push this narrative because they have products which facilitate this whack-a-mole approach to security. But there's no reason to believe that new software is more secure than old software. Old software is just more likely to be known to be insecure. So anything written before it became trendy to update without your user's consent is more secure in at least one way because it is not configured to automatically update to whatever comes down the pipe from "the vendor".
Right, the sub-headline "security through antiquity" is a nod to both the oft-repeated "security through obscurity," while pointing out the fact that antiquity is sometimes underutilized or undervalued as a security mechanism (even if not tamperproof). Cyber defenses are thus best multi-pronged, which offers the best protection- by maximizing the amount of time an intruder would need to spend to determine what system it is using.
About your second comment- newer systems CAN be less secure, but not always. But even if they are, falling back on things like eLoran are important.
Sure, it can go either way, and so which version to use is a decision to be made by the user, not on their behalf by a vendor.
Consider the CrowdStrike debacle. It wouldn't have been a big deal if they could just boot to yesterday's config because today's config is broken, but neither vendor involved trusts their users enough for that kind of thing, which turned it into a disaster.
It's remarkable how much more time one has to wait just to access the same level of information (Cookie Policy, EULAs, etc).
Even with "lighter" weight HTTP Firewall utilities such as Anubis (https://github.com/techaroHQ/anubis), the average user has to pay for other's (DDoSers) misdeeds. Now no one can visit a site without a firewall unless it's static and rate-limited by IP address to avoid crashing a small home server. Some impressive LMDBs might be able to serve up to 100,000 requests per second on a lightweight PC, but then again they could still be knocked offline from a super resourceful organization. I like not putting all my eggs in one basket.
A similar bug could happen with something like Cloudflare- the computer serving up the firewall could have a bug, and it's not programmed to fall back on serving the site without the gatekeeping. If the site is prominent enough, it might routinely face DoS attacks which prevents it from being used. But if it's an uneventful day, it could still manage a lower-tech firewall and still be functional.
> Interest in magnetic tape is only increasing further today because the cost of random access memory (Ram), a form of computer memory that doesn't rely on tape, is skyrocketing.
>The Irish Aviation Authority, for instance, recently decided to keep ground-based radio navigation beacons in use because supposedly the more modern satellite-based global positioning system (GPS) has proven so susceptible to jamming in recent years.
Back when my friend Jim (retired Pilot) and I visited Chicago's Approach Control facility, I asked one question "What would happen if GPS went away?", they didn't like the question one bit.
It's really not good the way we're getting rid of ground based navigation aids in the US.
Sadly, the real lesson we need to learn from Battlestar Galactica is not this. They weren't saved by old software, they were saved by not having critical systems on the network unnecessarily.
Our water and power utilities need to re-watch the pilot.
To be fair, it was both. Those ships that got the recent upgrades also got trojans that Caprica Six put in the defense mainframe with Baltar's access codes.
Why are our water and power utilities connected to the internet? Is it so that the employees controlling them can work from home? If so they are accepting too much risk relative to the benefit.
It makes sense to have them connected for a lot of reasons.
which reasons?
Remote monitoring is one of them presumably
think about a grid responding to demand. The old model (like the titanic) had a remote manager phoning the site lead who phoned the control room who phoned the engineering room.
Remote management has clear benefits, don’t be obtuse. I totally agree on the security risks, but the benefits are obvious.
I'm not seeing why it has to be connected to the internet. Make it a private, air-gapped intranet for all (or most) of the benefits of being "connected", but with no entry point for someone sitting on another continent to turn off the water.
mostly, because setting up a separate network is harder.
a virtual network built upon the regular internet is much easier.
And yes, mostly done wrong
I’m glad you raised this point. What are some of the better VPNs you’ve seen for secure industrial .
I asked because of books I had read about the bad ones, where unsecured industrial control protocols were exposed wirelessly , or via vpns. And I’ve been curious if any good ones are out there .
Are you talking about the media layer or the application layer? What would be the alternative to using the internet media layer? Every utility running their own private media ? So a duplicate network of media, as broad physically as the internet, that’s not connected to the internet? That hackers could tap into, and with poorer security, because it wouldn’t be constantly probed.
Because other replies aren't really stating it explicitly, let me add...
The water and power utilities are themselves large distributed systems. They need communications between elements just to function properly. They don't exist in a single location where people can go locally manage them in some air-gapped, offline fashion.
There is no option of not having a communication network to monitor and manage these geographically distributed elements. The question is which communication network you would use, and how you would secure it. Whether it is telephones, radio links, or people running around as messengers, it is still a communications network.
Will some "dedicated" network be any safer? If anything, I imagine the fantasy of a private network will lead to even less security. You cannot physically secure the entire signal path. You really need to treat it as untrusted and build your security on top with encryption, authentication, authorization, etc.
> the real lesson we need to learn from Battlestar Galactica
It's the same lesson that we can learn from Star Trek, Star Wars, and all the other self-aggrandising lore that humanity concocts when gazing lovingly in the mirror.
There is no greater enemy than greedy, barbaric humanity itself.
They're good lessons, so why insult it? Why mock quality storytelling that makes good impressions on people?
It's incredible how far back the surveillance state goes - GSM mobile phones have an IMEI number that's tied to the handset - and the SIM is tied to the subscriber, and your phone broadcasts imei to neighboring towers constantly.
I haven't really gotten really into this, but from what I can tell, anything that has to do with mobile phones is strictly worse in terms of anonimity than Wifi.
At least anything that ties a Wifi connection to you you can change in an OS setting, but if you get into faking IMEI/SIM stuff, that can very quickly get you charged with an actual crime.
One of the things about mobile phone is that there's 2 OSes on the phone: one that handles the phone stuff and the other that you as a user actually interact with. What's really scary about it is that the OS we do not think about is often licensed to the manufacturer (Apple, Samsung, etc.), closed-source, and dated. There's a lot of security firms that sell fake cell towers to law enforcement and governments and that gives them access to all of the data you send over the network. In older formats like 2G there was no encryption on anything sent over the wire.
If you dig into the fake cell tower rabbit hole you'll find what you're talking about to be an even worse problem.
> surveillance state
How do you suppose mobile phones are meant to work without subscriber info?
> I haven't really gotten really into this
Clearly.
Doesn't the whole SIM architecture exist so that phones don't have to be trusted? I believe IMEI can be anything in practice, so long that there isn't a blatant duplicate nearby, a bit like Ethernet MAC address. I don't know if it's legal but phone nerds seem to be editing IMEI all the time for non-Apple phones as well, using those leaked vendor tools.
This seems largely to be about security by obscurity.
I was hoping it was gonna be about how our modern practices are making things less secure.
For instance, we claim we need to be able to rapidly update clients so that we can patch security vulnerabilities as they are discovered (often without involving the user at all). And there are a lot of companies that have an incentive to push this narrative because they have products which facilitate this whack-a-mole approach to security. But there's no reason to believe that new software is more secure than old software. Old software is just more likely to be known to be insecure. So anything written before it became trendy to update without your user's consent is more secure in at least one way because it is not configured to automatically update to whatever comes down the pipe from "the vendor".
Right, the sub-headline "security through antiquity" is a nod to both the oft-repeated "security through obscurity," while pointing out the fact that antiquity is sometimes underutilized or undervalued as a security mechanism (even if not tamperproof). Cyber defenses are thus best multi-pronged, which offers the best protection- by maximizing the amount of time an intruder would need to spend to determine what system it is using.
About your second comment- newer systems CAN be less secure, but not always. But even if they are, falling back on things like eLoran are important.
Sure, it can go either way, and so which version to use is a decision to be made by the user, not on their behalf by a vendor.
Consider the CrowdStrike debacle. It wouldn't have been a big deal if they could just boot to yesterday's config because today's config is broken, but neither vendor involved trusts their users enough for that kind of thing, which turned it into a disaster.
Forgot about that. I intially thought you were referring to CloudFlare Captcha's, which Google and Firefox are partnering with: https://www.techtimes.com/articles/318891/20260623/cloudflar...
It's remarkable how much more time one has to wait just to access the same level of information (Cookie Policy, EULAs, etc).
Even with "lighter" weight HTTP Firewall utilities such as Anubis (https://github.com/techaroHQ/anubis), the average user has to pay for other's (DDoSers) misdeeds. Now no one can visit a site without a firewall unless it's static and rate-limited by IP address to avoid crashing a small home server. Some impressive LMDBs might be able to serve up to 100,000 requests per second on a lightweight PC, but then again they could still be knocked offline from a super resourceful organization. I like not putting all my eggs in one basket.
A similar bug could happen with something like Cloudflare- the computer serving up the firewall could have a bug, and it's not programmed to fall back on serving the site without the gatekeeping. If the site is prominent enough, it might routinely face DoS attacks which prevents it from being used. But if it's an uneventful day, it could still manage a lower-tech firewall and still be functional.
> Interest in magnetic tape is only increasing further today because the cost of random access memory (Ram), a form of computer memory that doesn't rely on tape, is skyrocketing.
hmm
Sign of quality journalism? LLM's probably would not have made such a misstake ..
>The Irish Aviation Authority, for instance, recently decided to keep ground-based radio navigation beacons in use because supposedly the more modern satellite-based global positioning system (GPS) has proven so susceptible to jamming in recent years.
Back when my friend Jim (retired Pilot) and I visited Chicago's Approach Control facility, I asked one question "What would happen if GPS went away?", they didn't like the question one bit.
It's really not good the way we're getting rid of ground based navigation aids in the US.
Here is a good example where this is not so. Unfortunately, my datacenter runs this vulnerable VMS release on an emulated VAX.
https://www.theregister.com/on-prem/2018/02/06/ghost-in-the-...
MS-DOS: Over 45 years, and STILL NO remote holes in the default install!
Things that are plenty and cheap to replace are easy to hack because if you broke them, you could always try again...
Box cutters? Plentiful, cheap, impossible to "hack".
Nuclear centrifuge software? Rare, expensive, hacked.
Daily reminder that connecting everything to the cloud was a terrible idea and should never have happened like it did.