Digital attackers are increasingly targeting energy organizations including those that support national electric grids. As reported by Morning Consult, security researchers found that utilities worldwide had suffered a recorded 1,780 distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks between June 15 and August 21, 2020. That’s a 595% year-over-year increase.Brando

Increased uptime? Check. Better access to outside expertise? Check. Improved first-time-fix rate? Check.These are just some of the benefits of industrial remote access. Yet many customers are reluctant to embrace remote access. Not only that, but incidents such as the breach at the Oldsmar water utility might increase organizations’ reluctance to use remote

The European Union Agency for Cybersecurity (ENISA) released in November 2020 its “Cybersecurity in Railways” report to raise awareness about the cybersecurity challenges facing Europe’s railways. The report identifies the current cybersecurity status and challenges as well as proposes cybersecurity measures to combat these challenges and enhance the s

Attacks against industrial control systems (ICS) are on the rise. In its 2020 X-Force Threat Intelligence Report, for instance, IBM found that digital attacks targeting organizations’ ICS had increased by more than 2,000% between 2019 and 2018. Most of those attacks involved the exploitation of vulnerabilities affecting supervisory control and data acquisiti

In the digital age, organizations and the missions and business processes they support rely on information technology and information systems to achieve their mission and business objectives. Not only is technology used to efficiently enable businesses to carry out operational activities, but it is also the backbone for the United States’ critical infr

A few years ago, I worked alongside some oil commodity traders. Environmental concerns aside, I never realized how many parts were required to get the oil out of the ground, not to mention everything else that finally resulted in the production of refined products that surround our lives. As a cybersecurity professional, I was more interested in how all

Digital threats confronting Critical National Infrastructure (CNI) are on the rise. That’s because attackers are increasingly going after the Operational Technology (OT) and Industrial Control Systems (ICS) that shareholders use to protect these assets. In their report “Caught in the Crosshairs: Are Utilities Keeping Up with the Industrial Cyber Threat?,” fo

Organisations are still underestimating the risks created by insufficiently secured operational technology (OT).One current example comes from Germany. According to a report by heise.de, external security testers consider it “likely” that a successful serious cyberattack against the publicly owned water company Berliner Wasserbetriebe could lead to a complet

In October, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) released its “2020 Staff Report Lessons Learned from Commission-Led CIP Reliability Audits.” The report summarizes the Commission’s observations from Critical Infrastructure Protection (CIP) audits performed in conjunction with staff from Regional Entities and the North American Electric Reliability

Hacked air conditioning and plummeting elevators?Imagine that you are in an elevator in a high rise building when suddenly the elevator starts to plummet with no apparent stopping mechanism other than the concrete foundation below.  While this may sound like something from a Hollywood movie, consider the idea that a securely tethered, fully functional e

You don’t have to search very far in the news to see stories of websites being hacked and customer details being stolen. Stories about incidents involving industrial control systems (ICSes) and operational technology (OT) environments aren’t so common. But they are prevalent. Just the other week, for example, an airline company sent out an email letting me k

By now, we have a good understanding of what secure remote access (SRA) is and why organizations might choose to enable it for their OT environments. We also know that securing IT-OT collaboration, leveraging guidance from best practice frameworks and using an automated solution can help organizations to implement this type of access. Even so, we still don’t

Researchers uncovered a new toolset they’ve dubbed “MontysThree” that has played a role in targeted industrial espionage attacks stretching back to 2018.In the summer of 2020, Kaspersky Lab discovered that an unknown actor had been using a modular C++ toolset called “MT3” to conduct targeted industrial espionage campaigns for ye

Today, we released a Threat Definition Update bundle for our Tripwire Industrial Visibility solution to aid in the detection of Zerologon.Otherwise known as CVE-2020-1472, Zerologon made news in the summer of 2020 when it received a CVSSv3 score of 10—the most critical rating of severity.Zerologon is a vulnerability that affects the cryptographic authenticat

Earlier this month, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) published a joint report entitled “Cyber Planning Response and Recovery Study” (CYPRES) in partnership with the North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC) and eight of its Regional Entities (REs) in order to review the methods for responding to a cybersecurity event. The report i