The story goes that a group of business people were stranded on a desert island with a bountiful supply of canned and therefore imperishable food, but no way to open the cans. As the group struggled to find a solution the lone economist in the group piped up, “Assume a can opener…”

We all agree that SCADA and Industrial Control System security needs to improve. However there is a lot of disagreement on what exactly needs to happen to make security for industrial systems easier to deploy and more effective. Last week’s blog exchange between me and Dale Peterson, is just one example of those differences. Now this week I am going to go in a different direction when it comes to improving security.

As a reader of this blog you likely don’t need to be convinced that SCADA and ICS Security need to be greatly improved. There are several ways to go about accomplishing that, and I am glad that there is a healthy dialogue underway on this topic within the industrial security community. This includes the back and forth between myself and Dale Peterson of Digital Bond, that continues with this article.

Browsing this week’s industry newsletters, I noticed that Automation World had two related stories on new technologies:

• Industry Interrupted: Tablets and Smart Phones Poised to Make a Big Impact
• Industrial Networking Desires Revealed

Editor’s Note: The Practical SCADA Security Blog has a very special blog contributor this week – Mr. Santa Claus, owner and operator of a very large toy manufacturing facility at the North Pole. This is a very busy time of year for Mr. Claus, so we would like to extend a big thank-you to him for sharing his cyber security story with our readers. We would also like to thank him for having the courage to publicly share details of an SCADA/ICS security event that occurred at his facility.