The dust (new details/disclosures) seems to be settling on the incident at the Oldsmar, Florida Water Treatment Plant that occurred on February 5, 2021. If you haven’t already, now is a good time to assess that your utility is not as vulnerable to the same basic cybersecurity shortcomings that reportedly contributed to the incident and/or have been identified during the investigation.
All eyes are on the Oldsmar, Florida Water Treatment Plant incident at the moment, and not just the security community’s.
What we know about this incident has been widely published and shared across countless mediums - including a WaterISAC advisory to members yesterday - so we will not belabor posting every source.
In the interest of incident reporting it is important to be able to identify and differentiate types of incidents being reported. It is also important to be able to understand the difference between an actual attack and an unintentional incident that may have attack-like consequences. Given cross-sector dependencies, some water and wastewater utilities closely track and apply NERC CIP regulations even though they aren’t required. NERC CIP 008-6 became mandatory on January 1, 2021 and requires bulk power system utilities to report attempts to compromise their infrastructure and operations.
In another reference to WaterISAC's 15 Cybersecurity Fundamentals for Water and Wastewater Utilities, you may recall this topic being discussed at #6 Install Independent Cyber-Physical Safety Systems. Consequence-driven Cyber-informed Engineering (CCE) is an advanced topic for critical infrastructure organizations, but one that shouldn't be overlooked.
As stated in #3 Minimize Control System Exposure in WaterISAC's 15 Cybersecurity Fundamentals for Water and Wastewater Utilities, critical infrastructure site assessments performed by CISA for the water and wastewater sector cite the most commonly identified network weakness is a lack of appropriate boundary protection controls. Furthermore, as Armis reminds, per NIST, network segmentation and segregation is one of the most effective architectural concepts that an organization can implement to protect ICS.
View the Security Awareness Compendium for Identity Theft Awareness Week on topics such as protecting digital lives, rethinking passwords, research on the cybercrime email infrastructure, and a business email compromise (BEC) investigation resource you NEED to have at your fingertips!
The famous jingle, “Ding-dong! The witch is dead” keeps coming to mind. But in a globally coordinated effort dubbed “Operation LadyBird,” law enforcement has dealt a crippling blow to the kingpin of email adversaries, Emotet. Europol released this statement yesterday and it was swiftly shared across numerous cyber news outlets.
Today, January 28, 2021 is Data Privacy Day. After this past year, we could all use some data privacy reminders as many of us have willingly acquiesced to greater contactless interactions, often at the detriment of privacy. From smart devices to consumer data, privacy settings and permissions, multifactor authentication, and encryption, there is room for everyone to improve data privacy hygiene.
If you are still trying to convince staff that EVERY one of us are susceptible to succumbing to a well-crafted socially-engineered cyber attack, then you’ll want them to read this post. The Google Threat Analysis Group (TAG) has identified a recent campaign targeting security researchers. The pretext of the attack involved engaging researchers to collaborate on vulnerability research. Vulnerability research is some of the most technical and complex work in the cybersecurity domain.
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