Why IT Security Companies are Not the Best Choice for Securing Operational Technology IT Security Company vs OT Security Company: Why IT Security Companies are Not the Best Choice for Securing Operational Technology As industrial organisations increasingly rely on connected devices and digital systems to manage critical operations, the importance of industrial cybersecurity has become…
I’m Going to Get Hacked Anyway In his book The Road Less Stupid, Keith Cunningham makes this correct observation about succeeding in business: “I don’t need to do more smart things. I just need to do fewer dumb things.” When it comes to cyber security, I see a lot of dumb decisions made by smart…
OT Attack Surface Management The attack surface of an operational technology (OT) system refers to the total exposure of the system to potential security threats. It encompasses all the entry points and attack vectors that an attacker can use to gain access to or compromise the system. The attack surface includes a wide range of…
Common Mistakes IT Security Staff Make in an OT Environment 1 ) Our ICS network is absolutely air-gapped. Throughout the years, we have heard this statement over and over again, specifically from IT department, but in practice and during our assessments, we discovered some sort of connectivity to internet either through the network or some…
10 Most Common OT Attack Vectors An attack vector is the method or path that an attacker uses to access the active target of the attack, that is, the steps that the attacker follows to materialise the threat, it is known that each attacker follows his own “strategy” to be able to consummate Its objective,…
Vulnerability Assessment : Active Scanning vs. Passive Scanning For quite some time, OT engineers and asset owners were horrified by the sound of the “active scan” and quite frankly, they were partially right. No one would dare to scan an OT network the way IT network scans were performed. An active scan could shut down…
How to Build a Defensible OT Network 1. Assessment Although vulnerability assessment and risk assessment are commonly used interchangeably, but they are two different approaches, and both are needed as part of a comprehensive security assessment. Another misconception is that security assessment is a network anomaly detection tool like Nozomi Networks, Claroty or Tenable. Any…
How to Secure Industrial Networks Against Ransomware in 2023 Since the outbreaks of Wannacry & NotPetya ransomware attacks in 2017, we’ve been witnessing daily occurrences of attacks affecting OT networks that originated on the IT side. The U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) also highlighted this issue for this very simple reason. It works. Ransomware in…
IT and OT Cultural Differences Why It’s Imperative to Bridge the IT & OT Cultural Divide We hear it all the time from security marketers and evangelists alike. “Information technology and operational technology are converging!” It’s a simplistic way of characterizing what is a highly complex web of digital transformations affecting a broad range of…
Is IT & OT Convergence Dead? IT/OT Convergence: Is it bringing two worlds together? IT / OT convergence describes the merging of information technology (IT) and operational technology (OT). In the past, IT and OT departments have been working in silos, but in the past decade, organizations have started to see the benefits of connecting…