July 22, 2025 the US House Committee on Homeland Security held a hearing, “Fully Operational Stuxnet 15 Years Later & the Evolution of Cyber Threats to Critical Infrastructure”. Stuxnet was not an attack on the networks. Rather, Stuxnet was a stealth attack that damaged physical infrastructures by manipulating physics. Stuxnet used networks as a conduit […]
Category: Policy
There have been many publicly documented control system cyberattacks that caused physical damage
Sinclair Koelemij stated in his July 20, 2025 article the only documented control system cyberattack that directly caused physical damage was Stuxnet. He is not the only one who feels this way. However, there have been numerous cases in every sector where there have been publicly documented control system cyberattacks that caused physical damage. There […]
Misguided response to the Norwegian Dam and Oldsmar “cyberattacks”
Not all control system cyber incidents are malicious cyberattacks. They can be accidents or errors, too. In their haste to find OT cyberattacks, the OT cybersecurity community, including regulators, continue to jump to conclusions about what are OT cyberattacks while at the same time ignoring incidents that don’t look like cyber incidents they are used […]
Government officials need to recognize the importance of control system cybersecurity
My colleague, Vytautas Butrimas, is retiring after a long and distinguished career. I am writing this blog both in admiration for Vytautas’s work but also to demonstrate that government leaders like Vytautas and former US Congressman James Langevin, neither of whom is an engineer, can become leaders in supporting the need for control system, not […]
Control System Cyber Incidents: The Hidden Threat to Grid Stability
Control system cyber incidents, particularly those originating from even a single compromised or malfunctioning sensor system, can impact vast portions of the electric grid (or other critical infrastructures). Despite decades of lessons and warning signs, meaningful progress in securing power grid (and other critical infrastructure) control systems remains elusive. This failure stems from foundational misunderstandings […]
Could the Spanish outage occur here
Mike Swearingen and I did a webinar for the IEEE Consultants Network on the Spanish Outage and associated grid issues. The webinar can be found at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4wnk8hZEzuw. As the final results of the Spanish outage are not finalized, our discussions were based on our experience. The initial discussions were on two questions: could the Spanish […]
2025 IEEE Power & Energy Society Summit: “Achieving a more reliable and resilient energy future”
attended the IEEE Reliability and Resilience Summit May 19-21, 2025, in San Jose, CA. There were more than 300 attendees from more than 150 organizations. The program can be found at 2025 IEEE Power & Energy Society Summit – IEEE Power & Energy Society.The key takeaways were: This was an engineering conference with the attendees […]
June ICS/SCADA Cybersecurity Symposium to address real CONTROL SYSTEM cyber incidents
In preparation for the June 3-4 ICS/SCADA Cybersecurity Symposium in Chicago, I continue to be aware of CONTROL SYSTEM cyber incidents. There were no discussions of control system cyber incidents at RSA, though there were many discussions of network-related cyber events. I was recently contacted by someone trying to find public OT cyber incidents leading […]
June ICS/SCADA Cybersecurity Symposium to address unique control system cyber security issues
June 3-4, I will be participating in the ICS/SCADA Cybersecurity Symposium in Chicago. My two sessions will address important control system-unique issues not being addressed elsewhere. June 3rd, I will be moderating a first-of-a-kind session bringing together a control system engineer and an OT network cybersecurity researcher to explore the cultural and operational divide between […]
The RSA Cybersecurity Conference is not relevant to control systems- what’s missing is in plain sight
Control system field devices have no cyber security, authentication, or cyber forensics. These devices were orphaned from cybersecurity programs as OT networks became the focus of cybersecurity programs and the RSA Cybersecurity Conference. At RSA, there were numerous discussions about network cybersecurity threats from Russia, China, and Iran, as well as on the latest APTs. […]