In 2020, car manufacturer Honda fell victim to a ransomware attack. Using a payload called “update.exe,” the attack crippled Honda’s international customer service and Financial Services wing for days. Although it affected two customer facing branches of this global corporation, the ransomware was designed to target and breach Honda’s critical ICS/SCADA environments.
The cyber threat landscape today continues to pose a myriad of unique challenges. This is especially the case for industrial organizations due to factors such as aging equipment, poor design or implementation, skills gaps and a lack of visibility. These shortcomings are exacerbated by the mean time to breach detection, which continues to hover above 150 days on average.
Reliability is essential to the functionality of an electric power grid. This principle guarantees that a constant qualitative and quantitative supply of electric power is flowing from a provider to businesses, homes and more. It’s what enables electric power to drive life forward in modern society. As a result, there’s reason to be concerned about events that threaten the reliability of the power grid. Those events include misoperations.
As smart ticketing systems and technological solutions become more prevalent in the transportation industry, the issue of transportation systems’ cybersecurity becomes a greater concern.
The digital threat landscape is always changing. This year is an excellent (albeit extreme) example. With the help of Dimensional Research, Tripwire found out that 58% of IT security professionals were more concerned about the security of their employees’ home networks than they were before the outbreak of coronavirus 2019 (COVID-19).
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.
The evolution of the cyber threat landscape highlights the emerging need for organizations to strengthen their ability to identify, analyze, and evaluate cyber risks before they evolve into security incidents. Although the terms “patch management” and “vulnerability management” are used as if they are interchangeable, this is not the case. Most are confused because applying patches is one of the many tools that’s available in our arsenal for mitigating cyber risks.
Each year on January 28, the United States, Canada, Israel and 47 European countries observe Data Privacy Day. The purpose of Data Privacy Day is to inspire dialogue on the importance of online privacy. These discussions also seek to inspire individuals and businesses to take action in an effort to respect privacy, safeguard data and enable trust. In observance of Data Privacy Day this year, here are five recommendations through which organizations can bolster their data security efforts.
As a security consultant, I’m not going into an environment to design and build an organization’s network from the ground up in most situations. For the majority of the time, I’m working with legacy environments where some old technologies might be phasing out and newer ones joining the mix of solutions.
