What an awful title. It&#x27;s almost unparseable, and the only I reason I clicked the link is to see if the article was as badly written as the title.<p>I have to ask: are the programming ports of PLC&#x27;s customarily left open after deployment? I have little experience with them, but I thought most programming modes reconfigured some of the (few) pins for programming. In normal operation, aren&#x27;t these pins reconfigured for something useful?<p>(edit: nevermind, seems I&#x27;m thinking of a lot smaller devices than the research article)