He is blaming a foreign company which is hiring his own comapny for failures his company is not adressing. Sorry stupid article. I´s not DHL´s fault that Southern Airline is not able to compete and to organize. Btw in Germany there are Unions for that. https://www.vcockpit.de/en.html
i am working in a steel plant for over 20 years now, and it is easy to bash the security of those people.
but just some facts from my world :-)
first those plants are build for lifespans of over 30 years. general problem is 15(normal review time) years ago no one was thinking about network security as we thinking about it know . most businesses didn't even have a large internal network wich did include the production and were connected to the internet.
second you can't just shutdown this things. if you have to shutdown a blast furnace we are talking about minimum stand time of 5-7 days. calculate about 400k to 1m € per day on standstill cost. and that is only for the blast furnace. if the blast furnace is not running in some steel plant NOTHING will run. (e.G. hot rolling plants)
third there is no good solution on the market. if some of your guys would look into the software wich is sometimes running those large machines you would get sick to your stomach. As a more security focused person in my plant just to convince management to change the std admin passwords was a handful (well that changed like a year or two years ago). The thing is market decides what security is gonna be implemented. since there has now been a breach and a very expensive one most companies i am talking to are more focused on security now. The thing is they won't just throw away their software stack they worked on for 30 years. and reviewing software is hard and time consuming. so it will be interesting how this is developing.