BOEING AND WANNACRY
 

https://www.seattletimes.com/busines...et-production/

Boeing hit by WannaCry virus, but says attack caused little damage

Originally published March 28, 2018 at 3:16 pm Updated March 28, 2018 at 9:16 pm

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Head shed top dog called for ' all hands on deck ' - then someone told him Boeing built airplanes, and he was not on the Boetanic.

Actually boeing did build a few ' boats' years ago

1) a jet powered pickle fork hydroplane used for testing

2) A few hydrofoils for navy in the 60's

But one still must ask why any machine tool was ever connected to internet in first place:mad:

Plus, the first airplanes built by boeing were seaplanes which are kinda part time boats.


Well I would expect that automated production tooling would be connected to a network, for various reasons, production monitoring, transfer of data from design or from other production divisions, quality control processes, and probably a host of other reasons I can't even imagine. the alternative you seem to be suggesting is that each discrete machine would have an air gap with the outside world, which would require manually transferring data with physical storage media, when data was required to be transferred to other areas production area. That would be: a) cumbersome, b). no guarantee that the data transferred didn't contain any virus.

I think one of the big upcoming business innovations is ways to use modern networked stuff (machine tools, etc) without them being connected to the Internet. There's all sorts of reasons to unplug a corporate network from the Internet, and finding ways in which that can still be made useful (i.e. get stuff into it from the Internet safely) is an area with lots of room for innovation. There's products like data diodes which help a lot for this purpose.

Air gapped isn't fool proof, but it's a hell of a lot harder for an attacker to take control.

I suspect that eventually in big outfits like Boeing one will get used to having a corporate network where one does all one's work, air gapped from a separate dirty network which one uses for Internet browsing, email, stuff like that.

To be honest, these days on a well run corporate network the best thing to do is to block off all USB ports with epoxy glue. They're so dangerous.

I have observed for many years that there are completely different opinions either side of the Atlantic. Americans will move heaven and earth to connect some really quite important networks up through firewalls and security gateways to the Internet, and will have endless discussions about ways of improving the security of such things. On this side of the pond there's much more acceptance of air-gapped networks. These cause looks of consternation, disbelief, pity and puzzlement on the faces of American colleagues, as if you've just told them you'd contracted some ghastly illness with implications for one's mental health.