In this Help Net Security interview, Andrew Ginter, VP of Industrial Security at Waterfall Security, discusses operational technology cyber attacks and their 2024 Threat Report.
He examines how global geopolitical tensions and evolving ransomware tactics are reshaping industrial cybersecurity.
Politically-motivated hacktivist attacks with physical consequences have increased in the last couple of years.
Almost all of these attacks are tied to either the Russian invasion of Ukraine, or the on-going Iran / Israel conflict.
These attacks have historically not been terribly sophisticated, but everyone is watching the emergence of large language model AIs to see whether and how much more capable these AI's will make the hacktivists.
Nation-state incidents are increasing as well - the Chinese were behind the Volt Typhoon campaign that compromised over 50 power plants and electric utilities in the USA, and the Russians are behind an attack on 22 large and small critical infrastructure providers in Denmark.
The 2024 Threat Report highlights a 19% increase in OT cyber attacks in 2023 compared to the previous year.
Ransomware has historically driven much higher compound annual growth in attacks with OT consequences.
A fraction of ransomware criminals appear to have moved away from encrypting compromised systems and moved entirely to extorting ransoms for promising not to publish stolen data.
We expect this trend among ransomware groups to stabilize, probably this year, returning compound annual growth in consequential OT attacks closer to historical increases of 60-100% per year.
There is a fair bit in the report about ransomware tactics, but let me give you some examples.
First, the most sophisticated of today's ransomware groups are either backed by nation-states - think North Korea - or are wealthy enough to build their nation-state-style attack tools, or they are actively buying and selling attack tools with nation-states.
Today, nation-state-grade ransomware targets everyone with money.
Second, a significant fraction of ransomware impacts on OT is because of dependencies.
Ransomware hits the IT network, encrypts a lot of stuff, and so cripples a large batch of IT servers and services.
Even if ransomware never touches the OT network, we must shut down production because production-critical services on the IT network are no longer available.
OT security practitioners really need to ask themselves how they depend on IT services, and whether it is acceptable to shut down physical operations if some attack cripples IT. The report mentions 'near miss' incidents in critical infrastructure industries.
The Russian attacks in Denmark were important, again because they provided evidence of nation-state activity targeting critical infrastructures.
If I may paraphrase, CIE positions OT security as a coin with two sides: one side teaches engineering teams about cyber threats and cyber mitigations, while the other side encourages engineering teams to apply powerful engineering tools to the task of preventing unacceptable consequences.
The most common such example is unidirectional gateway technology - hardware-enforced, engineering-grade prevention of the propogation of cyber attacks from the Internet and IT networks into OT networks, even nation-state style attacks.
This Cyber News was published on www.helpnetsecurity.com. Publication date: Mon, 15 Apr 2024 05:28:04 +0000