Siemens - the 1847 telegraph startup

The oldest company in this section began on 12 October 1847 with ten people in a Berlin back courtyard, building a telegraph that pointed a needle at letters rather than sending Morse.

In April 1870 the Indo-European line opened, and a message from London to Calcutta stopped taking thirty days and started taking twenty-eight minutes. Every other latency figure in this catalogue is a refinement of that afternoon: the problem was never speed for its own sake, it was that a decision could not be made until an answer came back, and for the whole of history before this the answer came back by ship.

The company nearly did not survive to build it. In the early 1850s the Prussian government declined to award follow-up contracts and, in Siemens's own telling, this plunged the young firm into an existential crisis. The response was to leave home: Russia, where it built a nine-thousand-kilometre state network, and England. Losing the domestic customer is what made it an international company, which is a pattern worth remembering whenever a supplier's largest account looks like security.

Two facts from the 1870s sit oddly beside the engineering and deserve recording as they are. In October 1872 the company established a pension and a widows' and orphans' fund, at a time when almost nobody did. In 1873 it moved Berlin to a nine-hour day where ten was standard, and to eight and a half in 1891. Halske, who had left in 1867 after disagreeing about how the company should be run, went on funding that pension personally.

The communications lineage is long and ends in pieces. A division formed in 1998, split in 2006, one half into the Nokia joint venture and the other into an enterprise business that passed to outside ownership. The telegraph company exited telecommunications almost exactly as telecommunications became the internet.

What it moved to is the reason it is a networking story at all. Industrial automation - controllers, drives, plant systems - is now the centre of the business, and that estate is precisely the population the access-control article describes as the hard case: equipment that cannot run an agent, frequently cannot authenticate, and cannot be taken offline to be fixed. The company that solved distance in 1870 now owns a large share of the problem that distance-solving created.

The industrial estate is also where this company met the first cyber-physical weapon, and the vendor's side of that story is the part usually left out. Stuxnet, found in 2010, was written against Siemens S7-300 and S7-400 controllers programmed through Step7, and it reached them on a USB drive carried through the door of a facility with no internet connection. Four Windows vulnerabilities got it across the engineering network. It then drove enrichment centrifuges through resonance speeds while reporting nominal figures to the operators watching. The Institute for Science and International Security estimated that around a thousand centrifuges may have been damaged.

Siemens was targeted for the ordinary reason that its controllers were what the plant ran. Being the standard in industrial control is what made the installed base a delivery mechanism, and no engineering decision by the manufacturer would have changed that.

Two details from it should outlive the incident. The malware carried a rootkit for the controller: when a monitoring tool asked what programme was loaded, it was handed clean code while the real one ran underneath. The instrument that would have revealed the problem was the instrument that had been subverted - which is the same failure the test and measurement article describes, arriving in an industrial plant.

And the remedy shows why this estate is genuinely hard rather than merely neglected. Siemens added authentication and encryption to the protocol in 2014, in the S7-1500 and S7-1200 lines. That update does not fit the older S7-300 controllers, which are the ones still installed and still exposed. The fix exists and cannot reach the equipment that needs it, because that equipment cannot be replaced cheaply and cannot be taken offline to be corrected. A plant does not stop for a patch window, and a controller that has run since before the attack was written is doing exactly what it was bought to do.