Mickey_D
Stainless
- Joined
- Apr 18, 2006
- Location
- Austin, TX
One of the big takeaways from the recent IMTS is that a lot of vendors are pushing network apps that let you monitor and even a few have some remote control capabilities through a smartphone or computer. Remote monitoring, access to spindle utilization stats, scheduled maintenance, etc. could be very useful, but opens a whole new can of security worms.
Haas, Mori, and Okuma are all pushing monitoring apps, but even the application engineers were at a loss to explain how they kept everything secure. I know that Siemens controls have had several severe vulnerabilities that have been exploited to cause mayhem and damage to machines and systems. I also asked the Haas engineer how they handled network security updates (they seem to be running some kind of embedded linux) and got another blank look, and Okuma does not update theirs either.
In a previous career part of what I did was network design and router and firewall configuration in both data centers and on client sites and was pretty good at it. Despite, or because of, this experience I still do not put my network capable machines even on the local network, files move between systems on dedicated USB drives via sneakernet. I might be pretty paranoid, but I know that one day I will miss a router update or misconfigure a firewall and something or someone might get in and the next thing that happens is we are either serving goat sex porn to perverts from one of the machining centers or someone has remotely trashed one of my expensive machines.
Anybody else thinking about this or am I just too paranoid from dealing with past worms, viruses, and network breakins?
Haas, Mori, and Okuma are all pushing monitoring apps, but even the application engineers were at a loss to explain how they kept everything secure. I know that Siemens controls have had several severe vulnerabilities that have been exploited to cause mayhem and damage to machines and systems. I also asked the Haas engineer how they handled network security updates (they seem to be running some kind of embedded linux) and got another blank look, and Okuma does not update theirs either.
In a previous career part of what I did was network design and router and firewall configuration in both data centers and on client sites and was pretty good at it. Despite, or because of, this experience I still do not put my network capable machines even on the local network, files move between systems on dedicated USB drives via sneakernet. I might be pretty paranoid, but I know that one day I will miss a router update or misconfigure a firewall and something or someone might get in and the next thing that happens is we are either serving goat sex porn to perverts from one of the machining centers or someone has remotely trashed one of my expensive machines.
Anybody else thinking about this or am I just too paranoid from dealing with past worms, viruses, and network breakins?