Re: SCADA

Has no body read "Web Security Soucebook"? Sorry for the plug Marcus.

It is timeless in the fact that the Browser is no more secure today.  
All I have to say is JAVASCRIPT. I
deal with more email dung vulnerabilities today than ever, so NO to  
the personal email, so go somewhere
else to do your personal recipe swapping.

         Leave SCADA where it is secure from the window of the  
Internet and its storefront shoppers. Notice I
did not say secure from all eyes. You have to realize the inside  
threat, but it is more manageable without
getting lost in a sea of faceless threats, which is my consternation  
over the patch updates issue, because although
it breaks stuff, there is always the wily newbie trembling to see if  
the vulnerability exists on the network. Here
with no internet you can catch him much quicker, but it still does not  
keep from the risk/cost of downtime.


Chris Myers
[email protected]


On Apr 16, 2009, at 11:04 AM, Paul D. Robertson wrote:

> On Thu, 16 Apr 2009, Brian Loe wrote:
>
>> On Wed, Apr 15, 2009 at 11:00 PM, Paul D. Robertson <[email protected] 
>> > wrote:
>>
>>> 1.  I'm not sure "no more" fits in the definition- for instance a  
>>> system
>>> that's designed to send company email can also send personal  
>>> email- how
>>> does that make the system less reliable?
>>>
>>
>> It propably - or probably should - violates the company's appropriate
>> use policy. It may also induce a non-business reply, or forwards,
>> which may introduce spam and viruses.
>
> That doesn't necessarily affect its reliability, and I don't know that
> many places which don't allow some level of personal email these days.
>
>>>> That's not exactly true. A system that does exactly what it
>>>> is supposed to - no more, no less - is achievable. It's not
>>>
>>> I'm not sure it's achievable.  General purpose systems are too  
>>> flexible to
>>> be completely locked down.  I can use my "Shift" key to play the  
>>> Monty
>>> Python theme, certainly not a design goal...
>>
>> You don't put general purpose systems on a SCADA network. They don't
>> do email - nor do they have an email client installed. The are there
>> to do one thing, run the SCADA application. Everything else has been
>> removed or disabled.
>
> Windows systems are general-purpose, PCs are general-purpose computing
> systems.  One of my customer's labs has lots of SCADA systems, most of
> them are Windows and some of them have email clients on them- because
> often the data has to come off the instrument and be used somewhere,
> another customer has process management systems that are Windows- 
> based,
> and there's more on there than just the process programs for the
> production lines (though not much more- they're not a research  
> environment
> like the first one- but the vendors don't always remove everything.)
>
> Not every SCADA device is PLC-based, more's the pity.  Some folks have
> environments where the SCADA devices need to be able to talk to the
> business network to dump raw data into business-side systems that  
> analyze
> and report on the data- and sometimes those folks don't look at  
> security
> when they do their architecture because (a) the connection was a
> per-project thing that never got architected, (b) the only place with
> space was the regular network, or (c) nothing's ever happened.
>
> I know someone who shut down a large hub for a major shipping vendor  
> with
> NMAP a few years ago- because it was all inter-connected.  You're  
> thinking
> best practice, and well there's a huge wall between current and best
> practice.
>
>> One could argue that you don't put general purpose systems on the
>> corporate network either. You put accounting systems in the  
>> accounting
>> department and HR systems in the HR department.
>
> Show me a computer that is only physically capable of running an
> accounting applicaion.  Pretty-much every computer these days is a
> general-purpose computer running a general purpose OS.  Heck, the  
> banks
> *require* Active-X enabled Web browsers for doing check deposits these
> days- accounting isn't what it used to be.
>
> Paul
> -----------------------------------------------------------------------------
> Paul D. Robertson      "My statements in this message are personal  
> opinions
> [email protected]       which may have no basis whatsoever in fact."
>           Moderator: Firewall-Wizards mailing list
>           Art: http://PaulDRobertson.imagekind.com/
>
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