The problem with discussing risk on a SCADA/ICS network, especially the way that most security guidelines describe it, is that it isn’t a linear function. In other words, the risk of A happening, B happening, and C happening are not A times B times C. It might be true with safety, but it is definitely […]

On June 7th the European People’s Party organized a public hearing on Cybercrime and Cybersecurity at the European Parliament in Brussels, Belgium (1) . It was a great honor to be invited as a speaker on Cybersecurity and Critical Energy Infrastructure for the second panel discussion covering the theme of “Cybersecurity: improving European industry”. I […]

“But as soon as we find out that it’s state-sponsored, or there may be state actors involved, we back away from that.” – Interpol digital crime centre director Sanjay Virmani Seems that the WannaCry incident should appear on anyone’s short list of notable cyber incidents of 2017 (so far). Some reports in the press have […]

Let’s fast forward in to the near future. The network configuration is well documented. The hashes of all code are known and recorded. Firewalls have been installed in appropriate places. The network traffic rates and patterns are known and monitored.  Physical LAN port statuses are monitored. In other words the control systems integrity is monitored […]

After 31 years at the Washington Suburban Sanitary Commission (WSSC) I’m eligible to retire. I will be starting a new position at Jacobs Engineering next month. My kids are looking at colleges and frankly, I need the money. I would happily stay with WSSC if I could afford to, but I can’t. In case you […]

I was swapping out a router today. Our old ones have served us long and well, but the vendor is no longer supporting them as they used to. We also had some creatures that I wanted to get rid of. On the wall in the telecommunications shelter there were three cheap 100Base-FX to 100BaseT converters, […]

If you’re from the IT side of the fence, I encourage you to read this. It is a steaming pile of lessons learned from expensive experience. I’m going to discuss a story from the field about a very mundane item that causes numerous headaches: Fuses. Last year, I was called to a waste-water pumping station. […]

I rant a lot about I/O testing and design. This is a discussion (and more ranting) of some of the tests and practices we do following construction and later during the maintenance cycle to ensure that the controls, and alarms will work as expected. Before I begin, one might wonder if embedded controllers or RTUs […]

As I have pointed out earlier, infrastructure should not become reliant upon other infrastructure. The reason is to avoid common failure modes and to make restoral more straightforward and less inter-reliant. This is why I have been looking at the SCADA-as-a-Service (SaaS) and Cloud SCADA with great skepticism. Let’s start with some obvious questions. Are […]

One of my broad based philosophical warnings to anyone new to the SCADA business is that utility SCADA is Infrastructure. Infrastructure should depend on as few other infrastructural features as possible. The more interdependent they are, the more likely it will be that something in common will break communications for all dependencies and the work […]