Dragos has finally been able to publicly release its findings from a prior Advisory Alert on February 17, 2021 to customers informing them of the watering hole potentially targeting water utilities along with defensive guidance and indicators.
If you haven’t read the April 2021 NSA Cybersecurity Advisory, Stop Malicious Cyber Activity Against Connected Operational Technology (included in the Security & Resilience Update for May 4, 2021), you are not alone.
We all dread them; we all need them – security audits. They can take multiple forms, but without security audits we are unable to measure cybersecurity improvements and many deficiencies may never be brought to light. Security audits involve evaluating or analyzing people, processes, and technology surrounding the security aspects of an organization. Likewise, as organizational networks and cyber threats are constantly changing, security audits should be performed regularly to assess if current controls and processes sufficiently reduce risk against the ever-changing threat landscape.
If your utility uses Microsoft Windows in a networked environment, there’s a near 100% chance you use Active Directory (AD) to centrally administer domains, machines, users, and groups. And like many legitimate tools, if not securely configured, can be a threat actor’s dream for gaining a foothold and hiding in plain sight within your environment. Using AD tactics is nothing new for threat actors, but two recent very large-scale compromises – SolarWinds and Microsoft Exchange – emphasize the importance of securing AD. When is the last time you reviewed your AD configurations?
Pardon the lack of fanfare that this report deserves, but this serves as an FYI that arguably the most heralded cybersecurity industry report, the Verizon Data Breach Investigation Report, affectionately known as the “DBIR,” was released this morning. According to Verizon, the Verizon Business 2021 Data Breach Investigations Report (2021 DBIR) examines more breaches than ever before. Some of the high-level findings include:
Ransomware attacks have ubiquitous relevance for all organizations, regardless of targeting set/victimology or targeted system (IT or OT) of the attributed ransomware group/family for any given incident. For every cyber threat group that claims they don’t target particular sectors or types of organizations, there are many more groups that do not espouse similar tenets. For example, while Darkside proclaims to only support targeting high-value victims capable of paying outrageous demands, many other ransomware groups are indiscriminate and opportunistic and project no such illusion.
Given cross-sector dependencies with electric utilities, many water and wastewater utilities are familiar with the North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC) and its Critical Infrastructure Protection (CIP) Reliability Standards. Some larger and more resourced water and wastewater utilities reference NERC CIP standards as they are applicable to many cybersecurity practices.
In 2004, Bill Gates prematurely postulated that passwords were dead. According to a recent DarkReading post, in 2005 security expert Mark Burnett wrote a book called Perfect Passwords, in which he floated the idea of dedicating one day in the calendar each year when everybody should change their passwords. Here we are in 2021 and passwords are still pertinent today and for the projected future.
In a heroic feat to maintain operations at a record-setting pace, countless IT and security teams rushed to provide accommodations for a new remote workforce leaving the office behind over one year ago. As we begin inhabiting those abandoned buildings there are bound to be some ghosts lurking around the office due to unintentional oversights when we left. If IT and security staff haven’t been on the premises during the past year, now is a good time to exorcise those ghosts before the masses return.
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