In the current geopolitical climate, the energy sector, which powers our modern society - from homes and businesses to critical infrastructure and national defense systems, finds itself under the growing threat of cyberattacks.
It’s no secret that the U.S. power grid is one of the main foundations of the nation’s economy, infrastructure, and daily way of life. Now that almost everything is digitized, it is hinging on it even more. We wouldn’t be able to use even most vending machines (not to mention cell towers or the internet) without a working electrical supply, and the importance of keeping it safe cannot be understated. Thankfully, a lot of positive changes have already been made.
Increasingly, security teams are tasked with identifying, understanding, and managing risk around devices that may live outside the traditional IT umbrella. Operational Technology (OT) refers to computing systems that are used to manage and process operational functions as opposed to administrative operations, with Industrial Control Systems (ICS) being a major segment of that OT sector.
Every news article about a threat group or attack floods the reader with classifications: nation-state groups, hacktivists, cyberterrorists, etc. But how can we define who is what? How can we differentiate between said categories? How should we deal with potential classification overlaps? Especially in the ever-evolving cyberwarfare realm, how can we approach these closely rooted phenomena?
In our first post on using BAS in an operational technology (OT) environment, we provided an overview of a typical converged IT/OT network, the trends that were driving increased cyber risk for industrial asset owners, and a high-level discussion of how BAS can help provide better visibility and protection across the converged environment.
If you’ve met me, you know I’m pretty direct, so I’m going to preface this whole post by saying: yup, this is being written by a marketer. As SafeBreach’s CMO, I know that going to RSA means being crushed by the immense force of vendors trying to stand out and in some cases using gimmicks. We’re certainly a part of that: did anyone get their tarot read at our booth this year?
Iranian state-sponsored hacking group Charming Kitten has been named as the group responsible for a new wave of attacks targeting critical infrastructure in the United States and elsewhere.
Electrical grid security has been getting a lot of attention recently. It started fairly quietly, and then when it was a featured story on a news program, it rose to the top of the collective consciousness. However, the news stories that followed were focused entirely on the physical vulnerabilities of the US power grids. Few, if any stories covered the cybersecurity angle of securing the grids.
