OT Security Is A Great Career

OT Security Is A Great Career

I was hooked on OT Security from day one. During my first SCADA security assessment in 2000 we went out to see damns, pumping stations, turnouts and other physical systems along a canal. This was much more interesting than sitting in a conference room or a data...
Questions on AI in OT & ICS Security

Questions on AI in OT & ICS Security

Unsurprisingly the largest category of submissions to S4x25 CFP have been AI related. Almost all of these submissions could have been written by generative AI. A paragraph or three on how AI is an important, fast growing technology that will have a major impact on OT...
How Successful Is Your Standard?

How Successful Is Your Standard?

Thomas Burke, longtime President of the OPC Foundation, had the best answer to this question in a podcast interview with Walker Reynolds. Success is measured by the level of adoption. That’s the key, when you go do anything with industry standards they’ve...
Embedded PLC Security Is Happening

Embedded PLC Security Is Happening

From 2001, the advent of ICS security, until 2019 PLC security was a “bump-in-the-line”. Place a Tofino or other industrial security solution in the network path to secure network communication to and from the PLC. This was widely understood to be a...
How Would You Like Your OT Remote Access?

How Would You Like Your OT Remote Access?

You can always count on Waterfall to take a different approach to solving a security need. (this is a good thing). They recently announced their Hardware Enforced Remote Access (HERA). HERA leverages Waterfall’s unidirectional technology (one-way, hardware enforced,...
FrostyGoop: 2004 Is Calling

FrostyGoop: 2004 Is Calling

And Still Awaiting Calls To Replace Unauthenticated Protocols Today Dragos released information on ICS malware they are calling FrostyGoop. The key lines from the release are: “It is the first ICS-specific malware that uses Modbus communications to achieve an...
The Next OT Security Product Market

The Next OT Security Product Market

The only OT security product market to date is OT Detection solutions (with a slice of asset inventory). It is led by Armis, Claroty, Dragos and Nozomi. There are another 5 credible vendors and 5 or more niche players. There has been a relatively large amount of...
Hospitals Are Different

Hospitals Are Different

Hospitals and other medical facilities get lumped into OT and cyber/physical because they have software and firmware that is monitoring and controling physical equipment and processes. It’s not wrong, but I don’t think it’s helpful. The high level, high quality OT...
Proposed Government Metric: Outage Pie Charts

Proposed Government Metric: Outage Pie Charts

This is fourth in a series of suggested metrics governments could (should?) use to measure OT security posture, incidents, and risk … something desperately needed and consistently avoided. Metric 1: Impacted People Days Metric 2: Leading Indicator Metrics Metric...