Mouse click could plunge city into darkness, experts say - CNN.com

So, what is the solution ?

I find this news distressing but, beyond shutting down the Internets, what can be done ?

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Off the top, I'd say that the solution is not to have mission critical hardware accessible via remote software. If that's true at my little manufacturing company, I don't see why the government can't get it right...

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"Government big enough to supply everything you need is big enough to take everything you have... The course of history shows that as a government grows, liberty decreases."

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I don't know that the control systems on these generators, that have to be individually accessed, have a mouse-based operating system. This kind of attack can’t be waged over the internet; it has to be done on the generator’s control panel. It is a vulnerability, but it isn’t as grave a threat as had been assumed.

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Me either, to me it seems they should of had a solution beforehand. This is a problem created by poor planning and a lack of forethought. That being said, how does hooking up critical hardware to a network increase efficiency?

I don't see why the Controlls should be connected to the internet...
Just give the poor guy in the controllroom a seperated computer to check out porn during work

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Hooking anything up to a network has the potential to increase efficiency. It allows employees to work from home or remote locations. Let's say that you had a hardware system that required a lot of operational training and 24/7 supervision. You could hire, say, four employees to man it all week, in person... or, you could hire two employees to man it most of the time, and to log in remotely from home if anything needed to be done.

Now, that said, it's still idiocy to allow that if the hardware in question is very important. The extra 70K per person or whatever per year that you have to pay probably offsets, easily, the cost of a disastrous fuck-up or a hack.

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"Government big enough to supply everything you need is big enough to take everything you have... The course of history shows that as a government grows, liberty decreases."

-Thomas Jefferson

Ah, I see. Still, it seems to me that it would be cheaper to pay for the extra man-power. Especially since they are more than likely not going to be able to meet the cost to protect such critical hardware from being hacked in the first place.