Among the tribes of engineers, there are certain things we just have to learn by doing. One of them is PLC programming. Somehow, we engineers are expected to emerge from college knowing good practices for programming a PLC. Some of us older engineers learned to program using FORTRAN. If we were lucky, we learned about […]
Category: General Topic
June 8th and 9th virtual keynotes to cyber security conferences – gaps between networking and engineering
June 8th, I will be giving a keynote at the Cyber Observatory IOT and ICS conference (https://www.cyberinnovationsummits.com/industrial-cybersecurity-iiot-event/). I also will be participating in an executive roundtable on supply chain. Also on June 8th, I will be on a panel session June 8th and giving a keynote June 9th at the 2021 New York State Cyber […]
Process sensor issues continue to be ignored and are placing the country at extreme risk
A recent NERC Lessons Learned event discussed where a combined cycle power plant in Florida suffered significant load oscillations because a sensor provided erroneous input to the steam turbine controller. The controller reacted by cycling the turbine resulting in 200MW load swings (see Max 737 plane crashes). These oscillations caused a 0.25Hz impact on the […]
Policy makers these days give peculiar names to what they are protecting.
“Abbott: Strange as it may seem, they give ball players nowadays very peculiar names”Costello: Funny Names?Abbott: On the St. Louis team we have “Who’s on first, What’s on second, I Don’t Know’s on thirdCostello: That’s what I want to find out. I want you to tell me the names of the fellows on the St. […]
“Air-Gapping” IT and OT?
Following the Colonial Pipeline Ransomware incident, Twitter exploded in to an orgy of blather from people demanding that we “air-gap” ICS. Those righteous keyboard warriors know what is best, I’m sure. We cannot avoid having a secured connection with the office. But on the other hand, we don’t need ICS networks to be connected to […]
Are your buildings and cloud cyber secure?
Many data centers that support the cloud as well as commercial buildings have not adequately addressed control system cyber security. The lack of adequately addressing building control system cyber security was demonstrated to have caused very significant financial and potentially safety impacts. When you consider these control system cyber threats can affect multiple buildings, the […]
Can We Trust Control Systems Networks?
Deputy National Security Advisor for Cyber and Emerging Technology, Anne Neuberger, was quoted by Adam Mazmanian in FCW on April 8, 2021 saying “We picked control systems because those are the systems that control water systems, power systems, chemical systems, across the U.S. And we’re seeking to have visibility on those networks to detect anomalous […]
Security Encabulation
For a number of years, work has been proceeding to perfect to the crudely conceived idea of a security augmentation system that would not only supply reverse DNS lookup for use in gratuitous ARP regeneration, but would also be capable of automatic stochastant intelligence. Such a computationless process is the security encabulator. Now basically the […]
Observations from 2021 SANS ICS Cyber Security Conference
The 2021 SANS ICS Cyber Security Conference was held March 4-5, 2021 with almost 9,000 registrants globally. The Conference thoroughly addressed OT networking issues. However, cyber security issues associated with Level 0,1 devices were not as adequately understood and addressed. There was also almost no discussion of the hardware backdoors in the Chinese-made transformers. My […]
Texas power outages demonstrate grid cyber vulnerability and inadequacy of existing regulations
Recent Texas power outages and the loss of both electricity and water across Texas demonstrate how vulnerable ERCOT and Texas are to not only natural disasters such as snowstorms and hurricanes but also manmade and malicious activities. More than that, it also demonstrates the vulnerability of the entire U.S. Energy grid. The good news is […]