Why is cybersecurity important to Education? Acknowledging recent reports of ransomware targeting educational institutions, it is no wonder that there have also been articles that attempt to lure in readers with “free” tools. What is disappointing is that these “free” tools are little more than marketing pieces that direct you to click on readily...

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...

Trust, respect, understanding. These are all two-way relationships that must be earned over time. Whilst someone being hired in a senior position will likely already have a certain level of each, part of your job is to continuously cultivate all three of these elements with colleagues no matter your grade. When working within a cybersecurity...

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. In the case of one environment I went to, for...

On January 7th, MITRE released ATT&CK for Industrial Control Systems, a taxonomy of real-world cyber adversarial behavior targeting ICS or industrial control systems. These systems operate critical infrastructure in manufacturing and utility industries, and they are popular targets in financial and espionage motivated attacks. Recent high-profile...

Most industrial organizations are behind the curve when it comes to cybersecurity, facing mounting complexities like the IIoT, the skills gap and the IT/OT divide. But what about industrial organizations that are already taking steps in the right direction and need to know what awaits them on the horizon? What practical next steps can your...

Since the implementation of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) on 25 May 2018, organizations and even private citizens have globally begun to re-assess what it means to ‘take security seriously’ and to better understand the massive difference between security and privacy. What you may not be familiar with is the Network and Information...

Whilst working for a management consultancy, I learned a lot more about industrial control systems (ICS) than I ever imagined I would. In many cases, this wasn’t from working on them directly; it was from simply speaking to the technicians and reading documentation. Oftentimes, we have the false belief that our systems are safe from compromise...

As we begin our new decade of the 2020s, we can look back at the last 30 odd years and examine the collaboration between technology and our daily lives. If you think of your day-to-day, it’s easy to see how much our society relies on technology. Consider our smart devices such as mobile phones, watches, even homes. However, what about the technology...

In a recent blog post for the State of Security, we asked security experts what they thought would make the biggest impact on the security of industrial control systems (ICS) in the next 5-10 years. They gave numerous answers, but perhaps the most frequent response was the ongoing IT-OT convergence in industrial organizations. Our experts felt that...

As we noted in August 2018, industrial control system (ICS) security has become more complicated since the introduction of the web. Organizations are now bringing together the logical and physical resources of both information technology (IT) and operational technology (OT). This creates various ICS security challenges, including how each team must...

The current security state of industrial control systems (ICS) is a perplexing one. On the one hand, Kaspersky Lab found in a recent report that a majority of organizations (75 percent) regard ICS security as a major priority. On the other hand, organizations aren’t implementing the proper safeguards to secure their industrial control systems. The...

Compliance with version 3.2 of the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) is a must for organizations that handle, process, transmit and store payment card data. But compliance isn’t always easy to establish or maintain. Indeed, there are certain challenges along the way that can make organizations’ compliance with PCI DSS 3.2...

Amidst the volatility, uncertainty and noise of the cybersecurity field, few best practice frameworks have emerged as consistently reliable and useful as the Center for Internet Security (CIS) Security Controls. Recently updated as version 7.0, the CIS Controls represent the most important security controls that an organization must implement to...