Speaker 1: I want you to picture your morning routine for just
Speaker 1: a second. You walk into the kitchen, right, maybe you're
Speaker 1: a little groggy. You turn the tap, and clean water
Speaker 1: just flows out instantly.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 1: You plug in the toaster, push the lever down, the
Speaker 1: coils get hot, you flip a switch, the lights come on.
Speaker 1: We live our entire lives basically expecting these things to
Speaker 1: just happen. Yeah. Absolutely, But we never really stopped to
Speaker 1: think about the invisible machine that actually makes all of
Speaker 1: that possible.
Speaker 2: It is entirely the background noise of modern civilization. I mean,
Speaker 2: we really only notice it when it stops working, usually
Speaker 2: because the power is out and we can't charge our phones.
Speaker 1: That is exactly it. But today we are going to
Speaker 1: peel back the layers of that invisible machine. We are
Speaker 1: talking about the nervous system of our entire infrastructure, something
Speaker 1: called SCATA. Yes, And to help us navigate this, we
Speaker 1: are doing a deep dive into a really fascinating source.
Speaker 1: It's called Cybersecurity for SCATA Systems by William T. Shaw.
Speaker 1: We're specifically looking at the second edition here, which.
Speaker 2: Is important because it updates this whole landscape for the
Speaker 2: post twenty twenty world exactly.
Speaker 1: And I have to say Shaw's approach is great, It
Speaker 1: really is.
Speaker 2: Shaw is essentially the definitive guide here. And what I
Speaker 2: love about his approach is that he doesn't just you know,
Speaker 2: throw dry technical manuals at you.
Speaker 1: No, not all.
Speaker 2: He tells the story of how industrial automation actually evolved,
Speaker 2: and frankly, it's a bit of a horror story when
Speaker 2: you look at it through the lens of modern cybersecurity.
Speaker 1: It really is a horror story. I mean, the central
Speaker 1: tension that Shaw identifies right at the very beginning, it
Speaker 1: was the big aha moment of the whole source for me. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's this idea that the systems controlling our water, our
Speaker 1: electricity are oil pipelines. They just weren't built for the
Speaker 1: world we live in today.
Speaker 2: Not even close. I mean, you have to remember these
Speaker 2: systems were designed in the nineteen sixties and seventies. They
Speaker 2: were built for a world of absolute trust and physical isolation.
Speaker 2: The engineers who built a power grid back then, they
Speaker 2: were worried about a relay failing, or maybe a squirrel
Speaker 2: chewing through a wire. A squirrel exactly. They were definitely
Speaker 2: not worried about a teenager in a basement in another
Speaker 2: country trying to intentionally turn off the city's lights.
Speaker 1: So we basically have these really trusting, innocent systems from
Speaker 1: like the classic rock era, and we've taken them and
Speaker 1: plugged them straight into the modern Internet, which.
Speaker 2: Is basically a dark alley full of pickpockets.
Speaker 1: It's wild.
Speaker 2: It is a massive clash of eras. You're taking a
Speaker 2: system designed for total isolation and you're exposing it to
Speaker 2: literally the most hostile environment imaginable, and that disconnect that's
Speaker 2: what creates the massive vulnerability we are living with right now.
Speaker 1: It's just mind blowing to think that critical infrastructure runs
Speaker 1: on a philosophy that entirely predates the concept of a
Speaker 1: cyber attack.
Speaker 2: It does.
Speaker 1: Let's dig into that history a bit, because Shaw talks
Speaker 1: a lot about this pre nine to eleven mindset. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it feels like a completely different universe from how it
Speaker 1: works today.
Speaker 2: It really was. To understand the giant holes we have today,
Speaker 2: you kind of have to get inside the head of
Speaker 2: a design engineer in say nineteen seventy five.
Speaker 1: Okay, let's go to nineteen seventy five.
Speaker 2: Back then, security didn't mean firewalls, it didn't mean complex passwords,
Speaker 2: it just meant.
Speaker 1: Safety, safety from accidents.
Speaker 2: You mean, precisely, it meant making sure a tired operator
Speaker 2: on a night shift didn't accidentally open the wrong valve
Speaker 2: and blow a pipe.
Speaker 1: Right. It's the don't spill coffee on the control panel
Speaker 1: level of security exactly.
Speaker 2: The only way to actually mess with a system back
Speaker 2: then was to physically be standing in the room. Shaw
Speaker 2: uses this term security by obscurity, which I have.
Speaker 1: To admit always sounds like a bit of a cop
Speaker 1: out to me. I mean, is it security by obscurity
Speaker 1: just crossing your fingers and hoping nobody finds the instruction manual.
Speaker 2: Well, in a modern context, yes, it's a terrible strategy,
Speaker 2: but in nineteen seventy it was actually highly effective. Think
Speaker 2: about it. These were proprietary, custom built mainframes.
Speaker 1: They were massive, so they were basically one of a kind.
Speaker 2: Exactly. You wanted to hack a dam in nineteen eighty,
Speaker 2: you needed to know a programming language that maybe only
Speaker 2: fifty people in the entire world even knew, and you
Speaker 2: still needed to break into the physical server room to
Speaker 2: type it in.
Speaker 1: So the lock was just that the key was incredibly
Speaker 1: rare and impossibly heavy.
Speaker 2: That is a great way to put it. But then, obviously,
Speaker 2: September eleven happened, right and Shaw points out that this
Speaker 2: was the major pivot point for the industry. The Department
Speaker 2: of Homeland Security was formed, and they started doing these
Speaker 2: deep audits of our industrial infrastructure.
Speaker 1: They looked at SCATA and these distributed control.
Speaker 2: Systems, and they realized these things were completely naked. They
Speaker 2: had literally zero intrinsic protective mechanisms because they had never
Speaker 2: needed them before.
Speaker 1: Because suddenly the threat model was an accidental failure anymore.
Speaker 1: It was intentional destruction exactly.
Speaker 2: We moved from worrying about mechanical breakdown to worrying about
Speaker 2: nation states and true believers who actively wanted to cause
Speaker 2: physical destruction through digital means.
Speaker 1: And this all happened right after as the technology itself
Speaker 1: was going through a massive shift.
Speaker 2: Yes, the timing couldn't have been worse in a way.
Speaker 1: Because we didn't keep those big, secure, mysterious mainframes. We
Speaker 1: actually swapped them out for well, basically the same kind
Speaker 1: of computer I have sitting on my desk right now.
Speaker 2: Right what they called it takeover. In the eighties and nineties,
Speaker 2: the industrial sector realized that building custom mainframes was incredibly expensive.
Speaker 3: Sure, but you know what was getting really cheap PCs
Speaker 3: exactly PCs Windows Operating systems, Intel Chips, standard Ethernet cables.
Speaker 1: So the whole logic behind this massive shift was just
Speaker 1: financial almost entirely.
Speaker 2: It's technological convergence. Why would a company spend millions to
Speaker 2: build a custom networking cable when you can just buy
Speaker 2: an Ethernet cable for pennies on the dollar.
Speaker 1: That makes sense from a business standpoint.
Speaker 2: And staffing too. Why train your staff on a weird,
Speaker 2: isolated proprietary language when you can just hire any IT
Speaker 2: guy who knows how to run Windows.
Speaker 1: Okay, but that sounds like a deal with the devil.
Speaker 1: I mean, sure, it's cheaper and it's way easier to staff,
Speaker 1: but doesn't that inherently mean the bad guys now have
Speaker 1: all the tools they need.
Speaker 2: That is the double edged sword right there.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: By moving to standard IT technology, we completely lost that
Speaker 2: obscurity protection we were just talking about.
Speaker 1: Because the rare key isn't rare anymore.
Speaker 2: Exactly, if you know how to hack a bank's website
Speaker 2: or just a corporate email server, you now basically possess
Speaker 2: the exact toolkit needed to attack a power grid because
Speaker 2: underneath the hood, they are speaking the exact same language.
Speaker 1: Now, wow, we lowered the barrier to entry for attackers
Speaker 1: significantly massively. That makes this invisible machine feel a lot
Speaker 1: more fragile. Yeah, okay, so we've established the big picture
Speaker 1: of vulnerability. But I want to get my hands dirty
Speaker 1: for a second. We keep seeing SCATA, but what is
Speaker 1: actually out there in the real world doing the physical work.
Speaker 1: Shaw spends a lot of time talking about the hands
Speaker 1: in the field.
Speaker 2: Right, So if the SCATA host computer is the brain,
Speaker 2: usually sitting in a nice, secure, air conditioned control room,
Speaker 2: the hands are what we call the RTUs remote terminal units.
Speaker 1: So these are the rugged little boxes you see sitting
Speaker 1: out in the desert or maybe on top of a
Speaker 1: mountain or inside an electrical substation.
Speaker 2: Exactly. They are the frontline workers of the grid. They
Speaker 2: physically connect to the real world machinery. They're the things
Speaker 2: that actually open the valves, read the line voltages, measure
Speaker 2: the flow rates in a pipe, and shop breaks down
Speaker 2: their evolution from dumb to smart, and honestly, the dumb
Speaker 2: ones were fascinating just in their raw simplicity.
Speaker 1: I mean, I wouldn't want to be called a dumb RTU,
Speaker 1: but I get the point. There was essentially just relays, right.
Speaker 2: Cure hardwired logic, no brain, no software whatsoever. Just if
Speaker 2: wire A has power, then turn on swich B. They
Speaker 2: were entirely reactive, right. But then along came the microprocessor,
Speaker 2: specifically things like the old Intel eighty eighty chips, and
Speaker 2: suddenly the RTU became smart.
Speaker 1: It got a tiny brain exactly.
Speaker 2: It could suddenly think, it could store data locally, and
Speaker 2: it could handle complex tasks on its own without having
Speaker 2: to constantly ask the main control room for help.
Speaker 1: Okay, so there was one specific detail in this hardware
Speaker 1: section that I really need you to explain to me,
Speaker 1: because I think I completely missed the brilliance of it
Speaker 1: at first glance. Which part the four to twenty million signal?
Speaker 2: Oh? Yeah, this is a classic piece of industrial engineering.
Speaker 2: It's the industry standard for measuring analog things things like
Speaker 2: pressure or temperature or the level of water in a tank.
Speaker 2: You send a continuous electrical current down the wire.
Speaker 1: Right, But why that's specific range? I mean, why start
Speaker 1: at four million amps? Why not just go zero to twenty?
Speaker 1: In my head zero should mean empty or off, and that.
Speaker 2: Right, there is the logical trap of it thinking, Oh,
Speaker 2: in a purely digital software world, zero means off. That
Speaker 2: works fine, But these systems live in the physical world,
Speaker 2: and in the physical world, wire's break.
Speaker 1: Oh, I see where this is going, right.
Speaker 2: Imagine you set zero amps to mean empty tank, and
Speaker 2: then some guy with a backo accidentally cuts the wire
Speaker 2: connecting the sensor to the art to.
Speaker 1: You, the signal on that wire drops to zero amps exactly,
Speaker 1: and the control room looks at the screen and thinks
Speaker 1: the tank is empty, but really the sensor.
Speaker 2: Is just dead precisely, So the operator starts pumping water
Speaker 2: into a tank that's already full because they think it's empty,
Speaker 2: and suddenly you have a massive disaster of flood and
Speaker 2: explosion whatever.
Speaker 1: But with a four to twenty system with four.
Speaker 2: To twenty four million ams is what means empty.
Speaker 1: So if the back hoe cuts the wire, the.
Speaker 2: Signal drops to absolute zero, and the computer instantly knows wait,
Speaker 2: the signal is below four. This isn't an empty tank.
Speaker 2: This is a broken wire.
Speaker 1: That is so incredibly smart it's called a live zero.
Speaker 2: It allows the system to diagnose its own physical health instantly.
Speaker 1: It's a failsafe built entirely into the math itself. You
Speaker 1: don't even need extra software for.
Speaker 2: It exactly, and it's why that specific standard has survived
Speaker 2: for literally decades, even as all the other computers got
Speaker 2: millions of times faster.
Speaker 1: Now, speaking of things surviving from the old days, there
Speaker 1: was another protocol that sounded straight out of a Cold
Speaker 1: war submarine movie, the select check operates sequence.
Speaker 2: Ah.
Speaker 1: Yes, this was specifically for controlling things right, not just
Speaker 1: measuring them right.
Speaker 2: This comes directly from the era where communication lines were
Speaker 2: incredibly noisy, just bad copper phone lines. Static on the
Speaker 2: line a lot of static, and static on a digital
Speaker 2: line can easily.
Speaker 1: Flip a zero to a one, which is a big deal.
Speaker 2: A massive deal. If you send a simple direct command
Speaker 2: like open valve, a tiny burst of static might corrupt
Speaker 2: that packet and change it to closed valve or open gate.
Speaker 1: Which if you're running a nuclear power plant or a
Speaker 1: gas pipeline, could be absolutely catastrophic.
Speaker 2: Right, So the engineers built a handshake. It's a literal conversation.
Speaker 2: The host computer doesn't just bark orders at the r TOU.
Speaker 2: It says I would like to select valve number.
Speaker 1: One, and the RTU actually talks back.
Speaker 2: The RTU replies okay, valve number one is selected. Then
Speaker 2: the host says prepare to open, The RTU replies ready
Speaker 2: to open. And only after all of that confirmation does
Speaker 2: the host send the fine actual command execute.
Speaker 1: Wow. It's like a triple check. It's literally are you sure?
Speaker 1: Are you really sure?
Speaker 2: Okay, do it exactly, And if any single part of
Speaker 2: that conversation gets garbled by static, the whole sequence just
Speaker 2: aborts safely. It prevented countless industrial accidents.
Speaker 1: That makes perfect sense. Now, there was one term in
Speaker 1: the hardware section that stopped me cold de bouncing de bouncing. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I assume we aren't talking about basketballs here.
Speaker 2: Huh.
Speaker 1: Why does a computer need to debounce a switch?
Speaker 2: This is one of my favorite concepts because it's where
Speaker 2: pristine software smashes into messy physics.
Speaker 1: Okay, paint me a picture.
Speaker 2: You think of a physical switch as binary. It's either
Speaker 2: on or it's off, right, like a light switch. Like
Speaker 2: a light switch, But when you physically slam a heavy
Speaker 2: metal industrial breaker shut, the metal contacts don't just connect
Speaker 2: perfectly instantly.
Speaker 1: They bounce, wait, microscopic bounces like physically bouncing.
Speaker 2: Yes, physically bouncing off each other, connect, disconnect, connect, disconnect
Speaker 2: just for a few milliseconds.
Speaker 1: Oh wow.
Speaker 2: Now to a human eye it looks completely instant. But
Speaker 2: a modern computer is so incredibly fast it reads every
Speaker 2: single one of those bounces, so it sees on off,
Speaker 2: on off, on off in the span of a millisecond.
Speaker 1: So the computer thinks the breaker is just totally freaking out.
Speaker 2: It thinks the human operator is flipping the switch one
Speaker 2: hundred times a second. So debouncing is a filter. It
Speaker 2: can be hardware or software, but it basically tells the computer, hey,
Speaker 2: ignore the total chaos for the first ten milliseconds, just
Speaker 2: wait until the heavy metal physically settles down.
Speaker 1: It's a great reminder that SCATA isn't just you know,
Speaker 1: abstract code floating in the cloud. It's code interacting with heavy, dirty,
Speaker 1: physical reality.
Speaker 2: Constantly, and that reality changes drastically depending on what exact
Speaker 2: industry you're looking at. Shaw makes a really big distinction
Speaker 2: between how an electric utility uses these systems versus say,
Speaker 2: an oil pipeline.
Speaker 1: Company, different strokes for different folks.
Speaker 2: Exactly, electric utilities live and die by sheer speed.
Speaker 1: Because electrons move at the speed of light.
Speaker 2: Exactly, if a massive breaker trips at a substation. They
Speaker 2: need to know exactly when it happened to understand what
Speaker 2: went wrong on the grid. They track things in literal milliseconds.
Speaker 2: They call it sequence of events or SOE.
Speaker 1: But pipelines are different. Oil and water don't move at
Speaker 1: the speed of light.
Speaker 2: No, they move relatively slowly, But pipelines have a completely
Speaker 2: different headache accounting. Accounting, yes, and this leads to one
Speaker 2: of the most critical concepts Shaw talks about in the book,
Speaker 2: the accumulator freeze.
Speaker 1: Okay, yes, when I read a cumulator freeze, it honestly
Speaker 1: sounded like a sci fi weapon to me. But you're
Speaker 1: saying it's actually about money.
Speaker 2: It's entirely about money and safety. Of course. Imagine a
Speaker 2: natural gas pipeline that's five hundred miles long. You have
Speaker 2: a smart sensor at the start of the pipe measuring
Speaker 2: exactly how much gas goes in, and you have another
Speaker 2: sensor five hundred miles away measuring how much comes out.
Speaker 1: You need those two numbers to match exactly, or.
Speaker 2: You have a leak, or someone is actively siphoning it
Speaker 2: off and stealing it. Right, but the gas is common
Speaker 2: instantly moving. If you ask the first sensor for its tally,
Speaker 2: and then ten seconds later you ask the last sensor
Speaker 2: for its tally. The gas has moved during those ten seconds,
Speaker 2: your math will be wrong.
Speaker 1: Oh, I see, You'll think you lost gas, but really
Speaker 1: you just counted at two different times exactly.
Speaker 2: You're basically chasing a ghost in the math, and I'm guessing.
Speaker 1: In the oil and gas industry, chasing a ghost is expensive.
Speaker 2: Incredibly expensive. It means shutting down a major pipeline because
Speaker 2: you think there's a leak sending out cruise, losing millions
Speaker 2: of dollars a day. So they invented the accumulator freeze.
Speaker 2: It's a broadcast command. The central computer essentially shouts over
Speaker 2: the network to every single RTU at the exact same
Speaker 2: time freeze.
Speaker 1: And they all just take a snapshot at.
Speaker 2: The exact same millisecond. They keep counting the actual gas
Speaker 2: in the background, of course, but they save that specific
Speaker 2: moment's number in a frozen memory register.
Speaker 1: Oh that's smart.
Speaker 2: Then the central computer can just casually collect those snapshots
Speaker 2: one by one over the next few minutes. It ensures
Speaker 2: that the accounting balance is perfectly across five hundred miles
Speaker 2: of moving product. It's literally like pausing time for the
Speaker 2: entire pipeline just to check the books.
Speaker 1: That is incredibly clever. It really highlights how these systems
Speaker 1: have to solve massive physical problems that standard it people
Speaker 1: never even have to dream of. I mean, my WiFi
Speaker 1: router doesn't care about the laws of physics or the
Speaker 1: flow rate of natural gas.
Speaker 2: No, it doesn't. And your WiFi router also isn't sitting
Speaker 2: on top of a freezing mountain running exclusively on a
Speaker 2: solar panel.
Speaker 1: That's another thing, the power constraints.
Speaker 2: Shaw talks about this at length. Some of these remote
Speaker 2: RTUs run on thermoelectric generators, which means they literally burn
Speaker 2: a tiny, tiny bit of the natural gas from the
Speaker 2: very pipeline they are measuring just to generate enough raw
Speaker 2: electricity to stay alive.
Speaker 1: Wow, it's like a lonely little robot out in the
Speaker 1: tundra keeping itself warm.
Speaker 2: It really is. And because power out there is so precious,
Speaker 2: they sleep ninety nine percent of the time. They wake up,
Speaker 2: burst a quick packet of data back to base, and
Speaker 2: go immediately back to.
Speaker 1: Sleep, which has to be a nightmare for cybersecurity. Right,
Speaker 1: how do you patch or monitor a device that is
Speaker 1: technically turned off? Most of the day.
Speaker 2: It is a massive headache. But eventually those sleeping devices
Speaker 2: have to wake up and talk to the brain. And
Speaker 2: that brings us to the tower of Babel.
Speaker 1: The networking protocols, the language of the grid.
Speaker 2: Yes, and this is where the history gets really, really messy.
Speaker 2: In the early days, every single manufacturer just made up
Speaker 2: their own language. Shaw calls these bit oriented protocols.
Speaker 1: Is there an easy way for us to visualize that?
Speaker 2: Think of it a lot like Morse code. It's just
Speaker 2: a raw stream of dots and dashes, ones and zeros.
Speaker 2: It's incredibly efficient for the machine, but you need a
Speaker 2: highly trained specialist to understand it. You can't just read
Speaker 2: it off a screen. It requires custom hardware just to
Speaker 2: decode it.
Speaker 1: But then, just like with the hardware moving to standard
Speaker 1: Windows PCs, the protocols eventually moved to what he calls
Speaker 1: character oriented.
Speaker 2: Right, think of character oriented protocols like sending a standard email.
Speaker 2: You are sending recognizable human characters, ABC numbers text standard
Speaker 2: off the shelf. Computers can read it easily. It's much
Speaker 2: more user friendly for the operators.
Speaker 1: But here is the massive trap that Shaw warns us about.
Speaker 1: Just because it's user friendly, doesn't mean it's safe. In fact,
Speaker 1: it seems like making it readable just made it easier
Speaker 1: for the bad guys to listen in.
Speaker 2: You've hit on the clear text problem. Most of these
Speaker 2: industrial protocols, things like mod bus or DANP three, they
Speaker 2: were designed for that innocent, trusting era we talked about
Speaker 2: at the beginning. So they send their commands in clear text.
Speaker 1: Wait, so if I'm a hacker and I managed to
Speaker 1: tap into.
Speaker 2: That wire, you can read exactly what it says.
Speaker 1: Anyone can just read it, not just.
Speaker 2: Read it, write it.
Speaker 1: Oh wow. Yeah.
Speaker 2: There is no encryption, There is no password authentication. It
Speaker 2: is exactly like standing across a crowded room and shouting
Speaker 2: your atm PI and code at the top of your lungs.
Speaker 2: If anyone is listening, they have it and they can
Speaker 2: use it immediately and now.
Speaker 1: And this is the part of the deep dive that
Speaker 1: genuinely scares me. We are taking these insecure, clear text
Speaker 1: protocols and we are putting them on the cloud.
Speaker 2: Yes. Shaw talks about this huge trend SCATA as a service.
Speaker 1: Explain that because it sounds like a terrible idea.
Speaker 2: Well, financially, it makes sense. If you are a small
Speaker 2: water utility in a rural town. You just can't afford
Speaker 2: to build a million dollar secure server farm. You don't
Speaker 2: have the budget. So outside vendors come in and say, hey,
Speaker 2: we'll host your entire SCATA system in the crowd for
Speaker 2: a flat monthly fee.
Speaker 1: So the actual control room for my town's drinking water
Speaker 1: supply is essentially just a website.
Speaker 2: Functionally, yes, the critical data travels over the public Internet,
Speaker 2: and I sure they use firewalls and VPNs, but you
Speaker 2: are effectively putting critical physical control functions on the exact
Speaker 2: same network infrastructure that carries Netflix streams and spam emails.
Speaker 1: And if that's small utilities, one it guy clicks on
Speaker 1: a phishing.
Speaker 2: Email, then the attackers might have a direct tunnel right
Speaker 2: into the physical valves at the water plant. The air gap,
Speaker 2: that physical separation between the wild internet and the industrial plan,
Speaker 2: it's just completely gone.
Speaker 1: There was one final twist in the book that I
Speaker 1: thought was the ultimate, absolute peak example of convenience killing security.
Speaker 2: SCATA without a SCATUS system m the brilliant RTU talk
Speaker 2: about this. So these field devices have gotten so cheap
Speaker 2: and so powerful that manufacturers started building actual web servers
Speaker 2: directly into the little boxes out in the field.
Speaker 1: Wait, the remote box itself hosts a website.
Speaker 2: Yes, the whole idea is convenience. An operator can drive
Speaker 2: their truck up to a remote electrical substation. They don't
Speaker 2: even have to get out of the truck in the rain.
Speaker 2: They just connect via Wi Fi with the laptop, open
Speaker 2: a web browser, and see the whole plant status on
Speaker 2: a web page hosted by the box on the pole.
Speaker 1: I mean that sounds amazing for a lazy operator.
Speaker 2: It's incredibly convenient. But just think about the security implications.
Speaker 2: You have a critical infrastructure device hosting a web server
Speaker 2: broadcasting a Wi Fi signal, often sitting in an unmanned,
Speaker 2: totally remote location.
Speaker 1: It's literally a drive through for.
Speaker 2: Hackers pretty much. If your guy can drive up and
Speaker 2: connect from his truck, who else can drive up in
Speaker 2: the middle of the night and connect. You are putting
Speaker 2: a glowing digital target on a physical asset sitting in
Speaker 2: the middle of nowhere.
Speaker 1: It really brings us all the way back to that
Speaker 1: central theme from the beginning. We've walked through the history,
Speaker 1: the hardware, the physics of it, the networking languages, and
Speaker 1: what I'm seeing here is basically a Frankenstein Monster.
Speaker 2: That is a very fair assessment. We have an infrastructure
Speaker 2: where the foundational philosophy was nineteen sixties isolation and total trust.
Speaker 2: Then we upgraded the mechanics with cheap nineteen nineties PC technology,
Speaker 2: and now in the twenty twenties, we're connecting all of
Speaker 2: it to the global Internet and.
Speaker 1: The cloud, and then we act surprised when a pipeline
Speaker 1: gets hacked and shut down.
Speaker 2: Right, But the expert view here isn't that the technology
Speaker 2: is inherently broken. It's actually doing exactly what it was
Speaker 2: designed to do. Move water, move power, keep the lights on.
Speaker 1: It works perfectly fine in a vacuum exactly.
Speaker 2: The problem is that we are using it in a
Speaker 2: highly hostile environment it was never designed for. We're desperately
Speaker 2: trying to bolt heavy armor onto a system that was
Speaker 2: just never meant to wear it.
Speaker 1: Shawn leaves us with a pretty heavy provocation at the
Speaker 1: end regarding the future of all this, because we hear
Speaker 1: all this buzz right now about the Industrial Internet of
Speaker 1: Things or IIoT, making literally everything smart.
Speaker 2: Right, and the big selling point for IoT is always efficiency,
Speaker 2: big data analytics.
Speaker 1: But Shaw points out a massive risk there. He says
Speaker 1: modern artus are now powerful enough to be fully autonomous.
Speaker 1: If hackers managed to cut off the central brain, the
Speaker 1: hands in the field can just keep working on their own. Now,
Speaker 1: on the surface, that sounds safer.
Speaker 2: Right, It sounds incredibly resilient. The plant runs itself even
Speaker 2: if the network goes down. But here's the question he
Speaker 2: leaves us with. As we rush to add billions of
Speaker 2: new smart sensors to the power grid to make everything
Speaker 2: Internet of Things compatible, are we actually making our infrastructure
Speaker 2: safer or are we just creating billions of new time
Speaker 2: tiny back doors straight into the grid.
Speaker 1: Because every single smart toaster or smart valve or temperature
Speaker 1: sensor is a potential entry point for an attacker.
Speaker 2: Exactly, we are increasing the attack surface exponentially, all in
Speaker 2: the name of efficiency.
Speaker 1: That is a very sobering thought to end on. I'll
Speaker 1: tell you what, the next time I turn on the
Speaker 1: tap in the morning, we'll have a lot more respect
Speaker 1: for the invisible, slightly anxious, nervous system that actually makes
Speaker 1: that water flow.
Speaker 2: Honestly, it's a miracle it works as well as it
Speaker 2: does every single day.
Speaker 1: A miracle and a whole lot of really hard engineering. Well,
Speaker 1: I want to thank you for joining us on this
Speaker 1: deep dive into the hidden world of SCATA cybersecurity. It's
Speaker 1: been eye opening.
Speaker 2: It was a pleasure to be here. Thanks for having
Speaker 2: me