...they've always had a problem with this, though. I was there years ago (at the beginning of the Internet boom) and we were one of the most hacked targets on the planet. Everyone seems to think that all the secret UFO data was in NASAs network -- and the pace of attacks was astounding. You had to have an RSA token to login to anything. It got so bad that we ended up having to put an optical tap (even as contractors, we fought that one) on the FDDI ring what was MAE-WEST so the FBI and other TLAs could try to track some of these idiots down.

Given that funding went down and many of the top IT / networking guys went into the booming private sector, I'm not surprised it's still a problem. All of the mission critical stuff is pretty well walled off -- but the rest of it has major issues. I don't think we'll loose a spaceship to it, but getting your email can be very annoying.

A combination of VPN access and firewalling does the trick. I've tested it with AB (EthernetIP) gear and it works fine. There are quite a few vendors that will sell you the parts, but they aren't the traditional ones (Omron, AB, etc,...) so most of the controls folks seem to ignore their existence. When it comes to control, go to them. If it's data security, Cisco, Juniper,...

This thread has -- to me -- completely validated the reason for the existence of the Internet. I've gotten a non-linear metric ass-load of pleasure out of it.