Stuxnet
Frank James links to a Hot Air piece about Stuxnet.
I have had a certain amount of personal, firsthand experience with Siemens controls, and I can tell you with some level of confidence, that the sooner Siemens and it’s subsidiaries and everyone who works there are parked, safely rotting away in the 8th circle of hell (they can occupy most of the malebolge) the better this planet is going to be.
With zero exception, every piece of Siemens equipment I have ever worked on, serviced, or installed has been a cluster of biblical proportions. All around the world, Siemens has used criminal methods to buy increasing market share and edge out competition. The product is unreliable and second rate, but they have a lock on a couple of key pieces of manufacturing technology that others cannot legally emulate; not that the legality would stop them, should the shoe been on the other foot.
The big selling point they use is what they refer to as their “open Architechture”. What this means is that there are virtually zero safeguards against making dangerous and damaging modifications to the euipment, the software that it uses to communicate, and the computers it runs on.
Other equipment, and other controls, like Fanuc, Mitsubishi, Yaskawa, etc. is closed architecture. What this means is it has specific limitations as to how it can be accessed. In some cases only specially designed equipment can even communicate with the controls. This doesn’t limit the systems; on the contrary, the equipment made by those manufacturers has logged untold billions of hours of trouble free operation, doing all the things Siemens can do. “Open architecture” in this case simply means “Any idiot can do any stupid thing he wants with it” and Stuxnet has proved the value of this to a skilled operator.
Siemens has purchased it’s way into the medical field in this country, by practically giving away equipment, then making their money back in spades through the ongoing service contracts, necesary to keep unnecesarily complex and finicky equipment running; the medical facilities are stuck with this because they can’t afford to have the expensive equiment sit idle and nonproducing.
The story at Hot Air and it’s comments tend to cast aspersions on the PC basis of the story; the PC software certainly had identifiable flaws, but the target was the Siemens equipment, and the programmers of Stuxnet simply exploited the PC flaws to get to the more critical target. They would have found a way if it were running an Apple or Unix OS, trust me.
Siemens were Nazi collaborators from the very beginning, and the blood is still on their hands; I have serious moral issues with them, and always will. Bottomline, I hope this awakens some of the people who have come to accept the Siemens party line and wakes them up to the dangers of dealing with these shysters.
I’ve worked on their electric motors when I was younger; I was not impressed.
Reminds me of Massive Dynamic, the megacorp in “Fringe”. Motto: “What do we do? What don’t we do?”
One early episode resolved a plot point with MD having a permanent, secret backdoor into every camera they produced, which was pretty much every camera, everywhere.
Our phone system in the main office is a Siemens system. It fails in little, annoying ways on a regular basis.
This kind of thing, though, makes me really wonder if open-architected operating systems are really as good of an idea as, say, the Linux-based community thinks they are. I’ve never been convinced and I’m even less convinced now.
Love the comments on the hot air site that say “Gee they are dumb to use Win7 they should use Apple/Linux”.
I could probably come up with a lot of good advice for the Iranians, but then I’D BE GIVING GOOD ADVICE TO THE IRANIANS.
:roll:
Nathan: One can make a linux system that’s effectively completely “closed” in the context Og was using, with little effort.
He ain’t talking about the core OS source code, but what the system as sold will interface with, and how.
(On the other hand, the confusion is understandable, since the term has exactly that other meaning in the software world, in most contexts…)
Man, that’s good to hear another negative opinion of Siemens. Step5 is an abomination. How it ever got a foothold is beyond me. Step7 is rather dreadful too, but the best thing to be said is that it aproaches Controllogix in ease of use.
let us not forget the oodles of dollars in fines they had to pay out for bribery :-)
Siemens designed the light rail (heavy streetcar) system in Portland, and it fails every time there is freezing precipitation of any kind (just when most would ride it because of lousy roads). It seems that the catenary won’t take the weight of accumulating ice AND the stress of a pantograph contacting it.
The system is standard-guage, with long-radius turnouts and switch sets, but Siemens wouldn’t let the transit district run ANYTHING but their rolling stock on the line. There is ONE (only) Unimog equipped with a coupler to move a dead train. In the old days of the electric inter-urbans (lots of them locally pre-1950), all the lines had box-cab motors (locomotives) in various places to assist trains, AND they switched rail freight cars at night to make the lines useful and profitable 24/7.
Siemans has foisted off 3 different car designs on us, but only the first two are compatible with each other, the last purchase can’t be MU’d with earlier cars.
The arrogance of this outfit is second only to it’s success in bribing local officials to buy their crap.