Just like the north Koreans are continuously trying to penetrate the demilitarized zone, there are hostile elements who use the world wide web as a corridor to attack. Since many historic IoT (Internet of Things) devices have very little protection, a browser program like Shodan can crawl the web and create map of connected devices. “Shodan’s been used to find webcams with security so low that you only needed to type an IP address into your browser to peer into people’s homes, security offices, hospital operating rooms, child care centers and drug dealer operations.”Kashmir Hill September 23, 2013 issue of Forbes. The real question is what do you do to protect your castle. it takes thinking in military terms to protect yourself from attack. I am not surprised that this picture of a turnstile was taken within a communist country. Their society has a lot more military control. It is curious that they think youth hostels are where the control is needed.
Camouflage is a great military tactic. After you progress past having wide open door to your industrial control by implementing a second 10/100 gate with a guard post, it is helpful to hide your new entrance in plain sight. In programming terms it is called spoofing. The hackers who are using programs like Shodan ignore you if you appear to be an uninteresting application. A USB to 10/100 converter costs less than US $50. The USB driver programs can be configured such that the echo seen by the search engines looks like a baby monitor for example. The only other major requirement is to invent a quick staged authentication so that a DOS (denial of service) attack does not block the legitimate users from logging onto the system. I can picture a time in the very near future when “lights out” manufacturing is IoT enabled. Current impediments such power outages can be remotely corrected if we can trust the remote access.