How to Stay Ahead of the Next Operational Technology Threat

The daily deluge of negative security headlines and data breaches isn't the whole story when it comes to modern cyber-security, according to Cisco. In a keynote at the RSA Conference here, Cisco executives outlined some key successes against recent threats and detailed a strategy for bridging the gap between information technology (IT) and operational technology (OT) systems. In an exclusive interview ahead of the keynote, Matt Watchinski, vice president of Cisco's Talos Threat Intelligence unit, and Liz Centoni, senior vice president and general manager of IoT at Cisco, provided the inside story on what's really behind the headlines of data security today. "We often don't talk about successes, but they are there and we can learn from them," Watchinski told eWEEK. Watchinski said that one of the underreported and largely unknown elements of VPNfilter is the fact that the malware authors had an embedded kill switch that quite literally could have killed the infected routers, severely impacting the internet as a whole. But that didn't happen, and the reason why is because cyber-security vendors, including Cisco, as part of a group working together with law enforcement were able to detect the threat and take action. The ability of vendors to work together is a key strength of the modern cyber-security landscape, according to Watchinski.