The problem with Finns
is that they are rather honest and expect other people to be honest too. Not such a good idea always, still I would add some stupidity to this too, trying to stick to the IT angle.
Security researchers in Finland have turned up thousands of unsecured Internet-facing SCADA systems in that country, using the Shodan search engine. The researchers, from Aalto University, ran their test in January, and found 2,915 exposed systems running functions from building automation to transport and water supply. Those …
Just google for "SCADA in the cloud" and yes, that's a real thing, and yes it will be implemented by people knowing less about security than an MSCE in the 1990s.There is also talk about using WLAN for such applications.
If we could just get SCADA security up to the level of non Win/Mac desktop security, we simply wouldn't have those problems. SCADA systems currently are hard enough to get running at all (ever gotten DCOM to run?) people rarely bother with security, as security means that there's another thing that can make it fail.
"I'd rather it not be installed in the first place."
Well DCOM is the backbone of many industrial automation systems. It's the base of OPC and is even used by some standards like PROFINET which combine DCOM with raw Ethernet packets... doing the signaling in DCOM and the data in raw packets, because... well... I'm glad I don't have to work in that are.
The big problem is that those people don't understand what they are doing. They have no idea why DCOM could be a bad idea. They have no idea why some complex standards like OPC-UA (using encrypted XML over SOAP with lots of complexity added in for what is essentially a pimped up key value store with messaging features) are a bad idea.
Well it depends. There's currently a push for WLAN systems for industrial control. Done right this can be sensible and good.
Imagine you had security cameras sending their pictures via scp with public key authentication or some similar scheme WLAN is not much of a problem.
If you however have simple webserver based solutions without proper authentication, it is. You should always treat you LAN and your WLAN in particular as an insecure network which may break and be intercepted.
So if you have WLAN cameras which watch over an outside area which can be seen from the fence anyhow, this probably isn't much of a problem.