* Posts by Bert_US

4 publicly visible posts • joined 15 Feb 2011

Amazon jumps the gun on free clouds

Bert_US
Thumb Up

Heh

I wondered when someone would bring this up. Our IS group has waged war one more then a few times on folks streaming music. Nothing like waiting 5-10 seconds for google of all things to finish loading...

Dozens of exploits released for popular SCADA programs

Bert_US
Unhappy

Locking down SCADA is a nice thought but...

When it comes down to it SCADA/PLC/Controls folks have less authority then even IT. I expect most have tried to keep these systems locked down because they are so fragile. In the end you have to crack them open so people can get the pretty charts and graphs. When it comes down to it most of this stuff was intended to never be hooked into the internet or internet capeable computers and has no protection as a result. When you can't say "NO" to opening up stuff security stops being a serious priority. Even had a department head once dual home his PC so it could touch internet and control network directly. Because, using ftp to get files through the control network firewall was too inconvienent.

Easier to secure the cloud than your data center - IBMer

Bert_US

What about data ownership?

One of my big concerns has been about what it takes for a group to get you data from the cloud provider. I was under the impression that it might not even require a warrant to get your data from them. Thought I remembered a story on here a while back where a company did not even know it was under investigation because law enforcement bypassed them and just delt with the cloud provider.

Stuxnet blitzed 5 Iranian factories over 10-month period

Bert_US

Win2k? I wish.

Heck we still use Win95/PCDOS kit for consoles. Patching like mad might work for general IT stuff but its not uncommon for SCADA stuff to break when patched. Also, serious revision changes generally result in having to reprove that stuff still works. That can take months to prove for complex configurations. AV is nice but it's not uncommon for it to cause havoc on SCADA servers, RSSQL, WonderWare, and RSView come to mind. When you get down to it SCADA/control stuff was rarely ment to be used outside of a closed system.

Might be flame bait but there is honestly nothing wrong with windows on critical servers. Most of the problems are from shoddy application code. Useally get a couple or three months out of our W2K servers until memory leaks from them get too big.