The classic 5 x 5 risk matrix with consequence broken out by category: financial, health & safety, customer impact, and reputation. Create scenarios and see where they fall on the martrix, with the ever present challenge of determining likelihood. The first...
There has been a steady series of announcements over the last four years of the largest ICS vendors, Emerson, Honeywell, Scheider Electric, Siemens, Yokogawa, etc., offering OT security services and security products. The marketing and sales of these solutions tends...
I performed my first ICS cybersecurity risk assessment in 2000 for a large water utility. Eye opening to the power of automation and lack of cybersecurity and cyber maintenance. In the six years that followed, the Digital Bond team performed numerous assessments and...
Two weeks ago I wrote Not OT v IT … It’s OT & Engineering. While the article received a lot of positive comments, the most emphatic comments were from a small number of engineers and automation professionals who essentially said: We’ve got this....
Cyber Informed Engineering (CIE), Secure By Design, SBOMs for all and everywhere, and large monitoring networks bringing back all sorts of data for visibility and analysis. These large programs, largely driven by government, make so much sense. Who...
I spent the week in Singapore participating in CSA’s OTCEP event. While reduced from year’s past, there still were a number of slides and discussions how IT is different than OT. I’m not sure what’s more wrong in this discussion: straw man or lack of understanding of...
CISA has issued a large number of documents during the Biden administration. Perhaps a flood the zone strategy to prove they are on it and how much they care. I’ve admittedly become a bit numb to reading them as they preach good practices for others with little...
Security controls accumulate, as do the costs of security controls. We see this in what is being lumped into ‘cyber hygiene’. We see it in cyber security standards and good practices. The set of security controls being added to government regulations and forceful...
I started Digital Bond in 1998 to develop a product to secure stock trading transactions over the Internet. A smart card (chip card) would be the second form of authentication and digitally sign every transaction for non-repudiation. This would prevent...
The System Average Interruption Duration Index (SAIDI) is a reliability metric used in the electric sector. It’s a measure of the average annual outage time for a customer. It can be measured by company, state, or country. The US data is available here....
