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The coronavirus pandemic has spawned a huge increase in cyberthreats and attacks. While much of this is aimed at consumers, a lot has also targeted companies whose employees must now access critical infrastructure.
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CISA published a set of cybersecurity best practices for ICS, which the agency acknowledges are important for supporting critical infrastructure and maintaining national security.
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IT security professionals are much more worried about cyberattacks on critical infrastructure than they are about data breaches in the enterprise.
The coronavirus pandemic has spawned a huge increase in cyberthreats and attacks. While much of this is aimed at consumers, a lot has also targeted companies whose employees must now access critical infrastructure, such as industrial control systems (ICS) and operational technology (OT) networks, from home.But that critical infrastructure, which keeps modern society going even during a pandemic, is seriously under-protected against cyberattacks, say recent reports from cybersecurity companies.“Critical infrastructure” means more than the obvious utility companies, water systems, and transportation networks. In defining essential workers during Covid-19-related lockdowns, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) lists 16 categories of critical infrastructure.
Last month, CISA published a set of cybersecurity best practices for ICS, which the agency acknowledges are important for supporting critical infrastructure and maintaining national security. These attacks have been building for some time. A Siemens/Ponemon Institute study last October found that 56% of gas, wind, water and solar utilities around the world had experienced at least one cyberattack within the previous year that caused a shutdown or loss of operation data. Only 42% of respondents — those responsible for OT cybersecurity — said their cyber readiness was high, and only 31% said their readiness to respond to or to contain a breach was high. Smaller organizations were much less confident about their ability to take action.
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Our survey found the more integrated IT, OT, IoT and physical systems are, the greater the degree of security, but because they are so integrated, these systems are more vulnerable to attack.
~ said Carcano
Since last year, a growing number of known threat groups have been specifically targeting electric utilities in North America, according to a January report from ICS/OT cybersecurity firm Dragos. In February, IT/OT cybersecurity firm Claroty discovered a new vulnerability related to the notorious Industroyer malware, used in the 2016 attack on the Ukraine power grid. Especially disturbing, the new vulnerability allows a DOS (denial of service) attack against protection relays used in electrical substations. A report Claroty published in March found that a clear majority of IT security professionals are much more worried about cyberattacks on critical infrastructure than they are about data breaches in the enterprise. That’s consistent among respondents in the U.S., the UK, Germany, France and Australia.
CISA published a set of cybersecurity best practices for ICS, which the agency acknowledges are important for supporting critical infrastructure and maintaining national security.
What’s less consistent is the gloomier outlook U.S. respondents have compared to their international counterparts about how much protection is still needed: more than half say U.S. critical infrastructure is vulnerable to attacks, versus 40% of international respondents. But all respondents agreed that electric power is by far the most vulnerable sector. Although some responses vary between domestic and international cybersecurity pros, “They’re more alike than they are different,” Claroty’s co-founder and chief business development officer Galina Antova, told EE Times. “There are some differences based on the vertical sectors, but even within them, a lot depends on the maturity of the security team. At the end of the day, what counts is the maturity of the security systems that team is implementing. On average, U.S. companies are ahead in the security curve when it comes to awareness and starting the implementation steps.”
In the last three years, more companies have become actively engaged in implementing OT cybersecurity, said Antova. Organizational changes that give responsibility for OT security to the chief information security officer will mean that necessary alignments between IT and OT teams happen faster, and these are happening faster in the U.S. than in Europe. However, local legal structures also play a part. For example, in some verticals in Europe, the head of production for certain types of facilities has legal responsibility for the cybersecurity of those facilities, so there are some stricter regulations in Europe compared to the US. The joint survey by OT and IoT cybersecurity company Nozomi Networks and Newsweek Vantage interviewed C-level executives at critical infrastructure companies in North America, Europe, and the Asia/Pacific region. It found that 85% of respondents had experienced security incursions into OT networks. Of those, 36% began as incursions in IT or data systems and 32% were physical incursions into OT systems.
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