Originally published at: http://boingboing.net/2017/06/28/asimov-was-an-optimist.html
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Industrial robotics security is really, really terrible
This guy can fix that.
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The obvious solution is surely to keep the industrial robots isolated from the network, isn’t it? There’s hardly any reason why they should be accessible from anywhere in the world.
I might also ponder how many industrial robots out there are stuck running on, say, ancient Pentium hardware (or something even older) simply because the vendors stopped supporting them and upgrading to newer components is too expensive.
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Buddy of mine is working for a company which addresses this general issue but because of an NDA I can say no more.
The same could be said about refrigerators or anything else on the Internet of Shit.
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True enough, but at least with home appliances it makes sense from a marketing standpoint. “Why buy that fridge when you can buy our fridge which connects to the Internet and must be inherently better?”, etc.
I suppose the big selling point here would be that you could, say, have employees (or better yet, independent contractors!) that work from home and control everything remotely, but surely we’re not yet at the point where shaving a few extra dollars off the bottom line would counterbalance the enormous cost of an unexpected disaster – and I would certainly hope that security would be better by the time things get there.
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A pleasant walk down Memory Lane:
“Although America has never acknowledged that Stuxnet was a joint US-Israeli effort, Iran got the message.”
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As someone here recently said: if a company can make $1.00 doing a thing safely, or $1.01 by ‘cutting a few corners’, then corners will be cut.
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BIG DATA, man.
Collect all the data you can, throw it to the cloud and AI will tell you how to improve all the things.
Haven’t you read your latest CIO magazine?
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So we are going to need something that lasts longer than the usual software/OS lifespan as I imagine these robots can do their thing for 20+ years and nobody is going to be scrapping all that cause it requires a 10 year old OS of any flavor it happens to be written for. Then there is the fun of the original vendor got sold, went under, etc and none of it is supported so you muddle along cause replacing a factory floor isn’t like putting the latest OS on your laptop.
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Yep. These are costs that were not factored into the budget when the robots were purchased. As goes with MRI machines in hospitals.
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How sad, I really wanted an xkcd illustration.
Best I coujld find.
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Why is this a surprise anymore? The companies that make this stuff don’t really care about security and the companies that buy this can’t be bothered to keep the devices secure cause “it’s too hard!”
I for one welcome our robot overlords!!
The problem is…this isn’t new.
I’ll just say I was asked about OS/2 within the last six months.
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