ridgel wrote:
> Thank you for the clear explanation of the virus that hit the
> Iranian power station. I'm still a bit stunned that anyone leaves
> windows boxes controlling critical infrastructure on anything but
> a private, disconnected network. Does anyone know if this is just
> bad practice on the part of the Iranians?
My day job involves programming the country's air traffic flow
software, and it's historically always been on a separate network.
This is a good thing, of course, because it means that someone can't
break into the network and crash our planes. But having a separate
network is extremely expensive, and probably directly or indirectly
doubles the implementation cost for pretty much everything.
So this network is an exception. I have no doubt that all of
America's factories, pipelines and power plants, including nuclear
power plants, are managed in exactly the same way, and are just as
exposed as Bushehr to a Stuxnet-type attack.
John