Comment by VyseofArcadia

Yep air-gapped security is a thing. But servicing, patching and communicating with air-gapped devices still needs to happen, which involves connecting to them somehow. Likely a manufacturing plant has started to connect everything together to streamline the process and created an attack surface that way.

You can see the appeal for not needing to go through all the issues, complexity and costs that entails.

I suppose we could all do what Asahi have been forced to do and go back to using pens, paper and fax machines: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cly64g5y744o

How else do you expect to move the information around between sites and use it?

Malware can hop through airgaps on USB keys, so that's not enough: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuxnet