-
Home Welcome
-
Products and Services
-
Support Technical Support
-
News Company & Products
-
WingBlog Industry Commentary
-
Contact Contacts and Info
WingBlog
Manufacturing Intelligence, Networking, Security & Some Unrelated Stuff
UPDATED: 2012-02-06 CORRECTION-CORRECTION-CORRECTION!! Major oops in this blog from last year, my apologies if it caused anyone problems! Turns out the Zimbra gui SSL upload is STILL not working for SSL Certificates and returns the same error:
Your certificate was not installed due to the error : system failure: IOException while handling uploaded certificate
So, I revisited my own tutorial and found a couple of errors - corrected version is next:
Up until the mid to late 1970s, alarms were an important tool used to enhance a process operator’s situation awareness. The steps to provide the operator with a single alarm included:
- Purchase and add a sensing switch to detect an alarm condition.
- Run conduit and cable back to the control room.
- Purchase an enunciator module to add to the control panel annunciation system.
- Connect all of the components.
This was not a task to be taken lightly and you only did it for alarms that really meant something. The physical space for adding the alarms was also very limited. As a result, each new alarm was evaluated and justified.
With the advent of the computer based control systems with layered applications, every tag in the system is a software construct. Alarms are now free. Also, every tag in the system has the capability of twelve to sixteen alarms To compound the issue, the young engineer, working for the engineering consultant or controls manufacturer doing your current controls upgrade, wants to make sure you get “your money’s worth” and will turn them all on.
I read a great article from Eric Byres of Byres Security, and it has enough meat for me to pass it along:
IT Security and the Plant Floor
A few months ago, while attending a conference on “Cybersecurity for Process Control,” we heard a question from a very smart network engineer at Cisco that got us thinking. He asked: “Why not just apply the already developed practices and technologies from information technology security to plant floor security— isn’t that good enough to solve the problem?” A week later, an IT security specialist said: “None of this would be a problem if those plant floor people just used proper security policies. What’s wrong with them?” Both of these questions are valid. In the dozens of industrial cybersecurity incidents we’ve investigated over the past five years, had the facility followed good IT security practices in network design, password handling, and access controls, virtually none of the problems would have occurred. So why don’t we just deploy the standard IT practices for our process control systems and stop making such a big deal of plant floor security? Are process engineers so stupid, lazy, or stubborn that they won’t just do what IT says? Process engineers are certainly not stupid, lazy, or stubborn (OK, there are a few exceptions). Certainly some don’t deploy the proper IT security measures because they don’t understand them, but most hesitate because they sense that somehow many IT practices don’t mix well with the plant floor environment. And they’re correct, for four very good reasons.
-
WingTip's News Feed
(157)