Amidst all the pandemic doom and gloom, we finally have something positive come from the chaos: NERC filed a motion recently (April 6, 2020) to defer three Critical Infrastructure Protection (CIP) Reliability Standards (as well as 1 PER, and 3 PRC standards) for three months due to the national emergency declared on March 13th by President Trump. As the original implementation date was July 1, 2020, this means that should FERC approve the motion, the new implementation date would be October 1, 2020.

One item that comes up a lot in conversations is how security teams or IT teams struggle to speak the “business language” to business leaders, mainly to members of the senior leadership that make the final decisions on spending and investments. This problem could have its roots in IT, and later security, teams historically having their management lines within the accounting department, ultimately being accountable to the Chief Financial Officer.

Digital fraudsters have seized upon coronavirus 2019 (COVID-19) as a lure for their new scams and attack campaigns. Together, these malicious operations constitute nothing short of a deluge. Barracuda revealed that it spotted 9,116 coronavirus-themed spear-phishing emails between March 1 and March 23, 2020—a 667% increase over the 1,188 attacks detected a month earlier. By comparison, the security firm spotted just 137 coronavirus-themed email campaigns in January.

Why leveraging live environment simulations and putting ICS tools to the test is the best way to evaluate their fitness. Track and field was one of my favorite sports growing up. I didn’t begin competitively participating until I was a teenager, but I was instantly hooked once I started. Why? Because the clock didn’t lie. The tape measure didn’t lie. The fastest time always won, and the longest throw always won. I like to think of ICS security tools in a similar way.

What’s happened? Well, Coronavirus 2019 (COVID-19) happened. Okay, smart alec. I know about that. What else is going on? Well, because so many people are (wisely) staying at home, they’re using videoconferencing and chat technology like Zoom to keep in touch with friends, family and colleagues. In fact, Zoom says that daily usage has soared from approximately 10 million daily meeting participants in December 2019 to over 200 million today. Zoom must be pleased. I’m sure they are.

The current pandemic has certainly shown the utility of electronic collaboration tools such as videoconferencing platforms. Once an expensive perk of solely enterprise companies, the video call is now used not only for executives remotely attending board meetings but also for the following... At the moment, it’s important for public health that everyone stays distant from one another.

Of all the tactics that an adversary will take on in their campaign, none will be more widely abused than, Execution (https://attack.mitre.org/wiki/Execution). When taking into consideration off-the-shelf malware, traditional ransomware, or state of the art advanced persistent threat actors, all of them have execution in common. There’s a great quote from Alissa Torres which says, “Malware can hide, but it must run.”

With so many of us frantically learning to juggle our roles as parents, workers and most recently teachers; is it just my wife and I who feel it necessary to monitor the online activity of our teenagers during this lockdown? Sure, there’s rich educational content out there, but it sits amongst social networks, streaming services, gaming consoles and a world of other distractions. I almost miss the days when staring out of the window was a reasonable ‘get out’!

Many in the digital security community are coming together to combat malicious actors during the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) global outbreak. One of the most visible of these new efforts is the COVID-19 CTI League. Made up of approximately 400 volunteers living in approximately 40 countries, the COVID-19 CTI League is working to block attackers from health care organizations and other medical facilities at this juncture.

Given the situation that many companies, organizations and government agencies have been forced into working remotely due to COVID-19, it is imperative to give some thought about corporate security.