The CISA Alert: Security Beyond Solitary Confinement

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JNIOR Overview

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8 DIN-8 Input Expansion Module

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US Power Supply

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JNIOR Din Clip

Expansion Module Din Clip

Power 4 Relay Din Clip

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Develop Your Embedded Application

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The CISA Alert: Security Beyond Solitary Confinement

Written by Bruce Cloutier on Aug 11, 2026 1:39 pm

@bscloutier

Summary: CISA is right to sound the alarm over Internet-exposed operational technology. But must every unwanted connection be answered with more authentication, stronger cryptography, and more processing power? There are remarkably lightweight ways to make malicious automation work harder while allowing OT controllers to concentrate on the job they were installed to do.

CISA has issued an urgent warning about the continued exposure of operational technology (OT) to the public Internet. The message is direct and deliberately uncompromising: act now. Remove OT connections to the public Internet, change default passwords immediately, restrict remote access, and strengthen authentication and network protections. These are not presented as suggestions for future consideration, but as immediate steps needed to reduce the growing cyber threat to industrial systems. [1]

The urgency is justified. But the growing need for OT connectivity makes one recommendation particularly difficult: simply eliminating the ability to communicate is not always an option. Nor should the alternative be limited to an escalating cycle of stronger cryptography, greater computational requirements, and eventual hardware replacement. There is another class of defense that deserves far more attention: techniques that reduce the attacker’s opportunity while consuming almost none of the controller’s resources. Perhaps it is time to bring some of these to the table and broaden the conversation.

Any IT professional who has observed the unfiltered network traffic at an Internet-facing device knows that the concern is absolutely justified. The public Internet is an extraordinarily hostile environment. Within minutes, an exposed device will encounter port scans, connection probes, login attempts, protocol fingerprinting, credential attacks, and other automated activity. Most people never see any of this and are consequently unaware just how relentless it is.

JANOS, the operating system at the heart of the JNIOR, was purpose-built from the start to support both OT and IT requirements. That has also made JANOS something of a proving ground. While the vast majority of JNIORs operate within air-gapped or otherwise controlled networks, we have intentionally operated units directly on public IP addresses – the worst-case exposure – to observe, understand, and develop defenses against this kind of activity. Watching that traffic in real time quickly changes one’s perspective on what an embedded device should be expected to tolerate.

Strong login credentials are an essential defense, but an attacker does not need to successfully log in to create a problem. A sustained password attack can consume significant processor resources for minutes at a time. Consider an SSH login attack where every attempt requires the controller to negotiate a secure connection before credentials can even be evaluated. As security algorithms become stronger, the computational investment in each unwanted connection increases. The attacker does not need to defeat the cryptography. It need only make the controller perform it. For an OT controller expected to maintain deterministic operation, simply processing the attack becomes part of the threat. Whether intentional or not, the result can begin to resemble a denial-of-service (DoS) attack against the controller.

Have we been addressing the problem or amplifying it?