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BobLfoot

PLC Keyswitch Default Position

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The recent Solarwinds/Orion Debacle got me to thinking about security and "best practices" once again.  I seem to recall Rockwell publishing something some time ago, perhaps during the Stuxnet Fiasco about it being most secure to leave your PLC Keyswitch in RUN position and only go to REM when you're actually editing online.  One company I worked for made this standard practice and we actually had to have a maintenance electrician move the keyswitch when an engineer needed to make an edit.  We also had a Wonderware "crawler" Script that checked all keyswitches and send a status email out nightly.  Anyone else encountered this sort of security forethought or have comments , ideas or suggestions on it?

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Bob,

 

The company that I have been doing contract work in since 2011 adopted the policy to leave the keyswitch in the RUN position at all times unless online edits (or downloads) are to be performed. It's been in effect for about 2 years. I do remote support so I have to call the facility to have the operator/technician move the key to RemoteRun and then call them back when my work is finished.

There is an Enterprise scanner (an -L83) that as one of it's responsibilities is to scan the network for all of the PACs (>250 of them) to report if the key is in any position other than RUN.

When a PAC has had its mode changed, it is logged and if the key remains in a position other than RUN, that PAC is included in the next day's report which is then sent out to the manager of that location to advise them of the situation. 

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19 hours ago, BobLfoot said:

The recent Solarwinds/Orion Debacle got me to thinking about security and "best practices" once again.  I seem to recall Rockwell publishing something some time ago, perhaps during the Stuxnet Fiasco about it being most secure to leave your PLC Keyswitch in RUN position and only go to REM when you're actually editing online.  One company I worked for made this standard practice and we actually had to have a maintenance electrician move the keyswitch when an engineer needed to make an edit.  We also had a Wonderware "crawler" Script that checked all keyswitches and send a status email out nightly.  Anyone else encountered this sort of security forethought or have comments , ideas or suggestions on it?

We have no machines connected to the internet on are process network and we port forward instead of opening ports.  You can protect against script kiddies but a good hacker good luck with that.

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