[graemep]

Will it help that this increasingly affects less specialist stuff (household appliances, cars...) that the general public use? It makes it more of a known issue.

With more things being network connected, how will we deal with the problem of keeping things not just working but secure? Is it generally practical to air gap equipment in factories and labs?

[bombcar]

Older equipment is often air gapped just because it really had no reason to be networked, and even if you DO want it networked, it's relatively easy to air gap.

It's the new stuff that is all "cloud based" that will have real problems in 10 years.

[sbrorson]

Yes, this will be a major problem for factories. Any "cloud based" software is guaranteed to become obsolete and incompatible well within the lifetime of the equipment it controls. If you're dealing with real manufacturing or lab equipment you should avoid "cloud based" stuff like the plague.

Most of the equipment I deal with is not on the net. It doesn't need to be since it's just controlling some machine which is busy making something real. If you need to move any data on or off the computer you use USB sticks (or sometimes CDs or floppies).

Some newer test stands are interfaced to an internal LAN so they can provide process control data to a database. In that case one either needs to provide some sort of firewall between the equipment's computer and the database, or just bite the bullet and redesign the whole thing for compatibility with, say, Win 10 (at major expense in time and money).

I wish I could convince people to target their automation stuff to Linux so the backwards compatibility problem would be easier, but corporations still balk at that.