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

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

NSA is warning of cyber attacks launched by foreign threat actors against organizations in the critical infrastructure sector across the U.S. The U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) issued an alert warning of cyber attacks targeting critical infrastructure across the U.S. “Over recent mont

The Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and the National Security Agency (NSA) laid out a series of recommendations for critical infrastructure owners and operators to protect their operational technology (OT) assets.In an alert published on July 23, CISA published an alert in which it recognized malicious actors’ growing willingn

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) is warning critical U.S. infrastructure operators of a recent ransomware attack that affected a natural gas compression facility. The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) issued an alert across critical U.S. infrastructure sectors about a recent infection at a natural gas comp

According to IBM, OT attacks increased by over 2000 percent in 2019, most of them involved the Echobot IoT malware. IBM’s 2020 X-Force Threat Intelligence Index report analyzes the threat landscape in 2019, the experts observed a spike in the number of OT attacks. According to IBM X-Force, attacks targeting operational technology (OT) infrastructure in

Trust, respect, understanding. These are all two-way relationships that must be earned over time. Whilst someone being hired in a senior position will likely already have a certain level of each, part of your job is to continuously cultivate all three of these elements with colleagues no matter your grade. When working within a cybersecurity practice, it is

Schneider Electric, Allen-Bradley, General Electric (GE) and more vendors are vulnerable to ClearEnergy ransomware. Researchers at CRITIFENCE® Critical Infrastructure and SCADA/ICS Cyber Threats Research Group have demonstrated this week a new proof of concept ransomware attack aiming to erase (clear) the ladder logic diagram in Programmable Logic Controlle

The Internet of Things (IoT) embodies great promise and risk. On the one hand, ordinary users view IoT as a means of streamlining their activities across billions of “smart” devices. They hope such connectivity will ultimately translate into better and easier lives. On the other hand, IoT devices aren’t always designed with security in mind

A new report reveals that 68 percent of oil and gas organizations have experienced at least one digital attack.In the Siemens-sponsored The State of Cybersecurity in the Oil & Gas Industry: United States (PDF), Ponemeon Institute surveyed 377 individuals based in the United States who are responsible for overseeing digital risk to their organization̵

Securing critical infrastructure is becoming a priority for the public and private sectors. Cyber professionals everywhere are rejoicing about the increasing investments in protecting the networks and systems that keep us safe at night. The Oval Office has even signaled its intentions to make security a priority.We welcome the new administration’s desire for

Hackers manipulated the programmable logic controllers that managed the amount of chemicals used to treat the water to make it safe to drink.   NEW YORK — March 23, 2016 — Hackers breached a water company’s industrial control system and made changes to valve and flow control settings, Verizon revealed in its latest Data Breach Digest. The unnamed w

In a previous blog post, ICS: Next Frontier For Cyber Attacks blog, I spoke about the cybersecurity posture of industrial control systems (ICS) and the enormous implications for such attacks. For industrial organizations, it means downtime and lost business. For individuals, it means potential safety issues and lost services. For society, it means significan

Security is not the same for the industrial control systems (ICS) as it is for information technology (IT). This difference in part arises from the unique characteristics that set IoT and IT environments apart from one another.Take IT, for instance. One of the most important business drivers for securing systems in those types of environments is mitigating r

Defensible and defended are not the same thing. There are characteristics of an environment that make it more or less defensible. While IT and OT environments both have some mixed results, in general, OT environments are more defensible than IT environments. My hypothesis, as a reminder, is that a more defensible network is one in which currently unknown att