S4

Talos Kegerator

At Industrial Control Security Con: Will hack IoT for Beer

In-brief: Cisco’s Marc Blackmer reports from the S4 Conference in Miami – one of the top gatherings of industrial control system security experts. Among the attractions this year: Justine Bone of the firm Medsec, the psychology of malicious insiders and a hackable “kegerator.”

Second Ukraine Power Outage Linked to Russian Hackers

In-brief: A cyber attack in December was responsible for a power outage in Ukraine – almost a year to the day after a similar attack in 2015, new research shows.

an image of a metal tower of Power Lines

New Firm Sniffs Power Consumption to detect Malware

  In-brief: A new company, PFP Cybersecurity, says it can detect malware infections almost instantly by analyzing changes in the way infected devices consume power. The company is targeting industrial control system and critical infrastructure with new products. 

Industrial Control Vendors Identified In Dragonfly Attack

Two of the three vendors who were victims of a targeted malware attack dubbed ‘Dragonfly’ by the security firm Symantec have been identified by industrial control system security experts. Writing on Tuesday, Dale Peterson of the firm Digitalbond identified the vendors as MB Connect Line, a German maker of industrial routers and remote access appliances and eWon, a Belgian firm that makes virtual private network (VPN) software that is used to access industrial control devices like programmable logic controllers. Peterson has also identified the third vendor, identified by F-Secure as a Swiss company, but told The Security Ledger that he cannot share the name of that firm. The three firms, which serve customers in industry, including owners of critical infrastructure, were the subject of a warning from the Department of Homeland Security. DHS’s ICS CERT, the Industrial Control Systems Computer Emergency Response Team, said it was alerted to compromises of the vendors’ by researchers […]

Diagram of a steam engine

Is Analog The Answer To Cyber Terrorism?

Ralph Langner is one of the foremost experts on the security of critical infrastructure that we have. So, generally, when Ralph says something – whether its about Stuxnet, or cyberwar or the security of nuclear power plants – folks listen. And these days, Ralph is wondering, out loud, whether our reliance on digital systems to manage critical infrastructure has gone too far. The answer, he suggests, may be to go “back to the future,” as it were: reintroducing analog systems into the control process chain as a backstop for cyber attacks. Case in point: the Department of Homeland Security’s ICS-CERT warned on Friday that firmware for Siemens SIMATIC S7-1500 CPUs (Central Processing Units) contain nine vulnerabilities that could enable attacks such as cross site request forgery, cross site scripting and URL redirection. (Siemens has issued a firmware update that patches the holes.) Langner is among the world’s foremost experts on […]