Dale Peterson speaks with Joel Langill, the SCADAHacker, about his new training course entitled Conducting Threat, Vulnerability, and Risk Assessments For ICS. A two day version of this course will be offered prior to S4x25.  Of course Dale and Joel jump around a bit on training, the workforce and other items. Take a listen.

Stewart Baker is one of the preeminent lawyers on topics of cyber law with an impressive career in and out of government. Stewart also hosts the Cyberlaw podcast. The Biden administration is contending that vendors should be held liable for security deficiencies in their products.  Assuming this is turned into law and/or executive orders, what does it mean? What can we learn from other liability law to inform us what would be required for a vendor to be held liable for a security issue? How...

Dale Peterson interviews Rob Lee on the S4 Main Stage. They cover a lot of ground and Rob is never shy about sharing his opinions and analysis. They discuss: Rob’s first S4 PIPEDREAM deployed v. employed distinction … and why 2 years later is it still the most dangerous ICS malware? Are we really more homogenous? What makes a group something that Rob/Dragos tracks as an ICS focused attacker? If the answer to intel is do the basics, do I need intel? What ICS specific data was VOLTZITE...

Chris Hughes and Nikki Robinson recently wrote the book Effective Vulnerability Management. Dale and Chris discuss the topic and book including: The definition and scope of vulnerabilities. It’s much more than coding errors that need patches. Are ICS protocols lacking authentication “vulnerabilities” The reality that most organizations have 100’s of thousands of unpatched vulnerabilities. Some statistics and will this change. Ways to prioritize what vulnerabilities you address. ...

Waterfall Security Solutions and ICSSTRIVE put out an annual threat report that Dale Peterson believes is the best in OT. Why? It only includes incidents that had physical consequences on systems monitored and controlled by OT.  Dale and Andrew discuss: What is in and out of scope for the report. The breakdown of the 68 incidents that occurred in 2023 by industry sector, cause, threat actor and more. The impact reporting requirements may have on these numbers in the future. What...

Patrick Miller has OT cybersecurity experience as an asset owner, PacificCorp. As a regulator and one of the first NERC CIP auditors with WECC. As a community organizer creating and leading EnergySec and the BeerISAC. And as an entrepreneur creating and leading a number of consulting practices. He is currently the Founder of Ampyx Cyber.   In this episode Patrick and Dale discuss: Why Patrick changed the company name and selected Talinn as the location for the new European office. The...

Emma Stewart joins Dale to discuss the 3 big OT & ICS security stories from the first quarter. They end by giving their win, fail and prediction for Q1.

In this solosode episode Dale reviews the status of his three predictions from the Q1, 2 and 3 quarter in review episodes and answers a listener question.

Dale is joined by Steve Pozza, CISA Section Chief of Operational Resilience, and Tom Millar, CISA Branch Chief of Resilience, to discuss some of CISA's security services for asset owners. They discuss: The Internet accessible attack surface enumeration and vulnerability scanning surface. Asset owners can buy products or services to do this. Why is the government doing this? What CISA is doing with this attack surface data? How is CISA measuring the success of this service offering? Other...

Andrew Ginter published his third book this year: Engineering-Grade OT Security. Dale interviews Andrew on the book including: Who was the target reader that Andrew wrote the book for? Do (should) professional engineers lose their licenses for poor and dangerous cybersecurity design and deployments? The use of the term engineering grade, and how he defines it. Unhackable protection and safety controls as a major part of engineering grade. Unidirectional (one-way) network devices as the...

This week is a Dale Peterson solosode. Updates and Announcements Dale provides updates about S4x24 ticket sales and announces the Women In ICS Security program and sponsor package. Main Topics Asset Inventory in Cybersecurity: Dale challenges the common security mantra "You can't protect what you don't know," using examples from both physical and cyber domains. He notes many of the comments on this week's article missed the main point, and he gives hints on the next two asset inventory...

Kelly joins Dale to discuss her new book Security Chaos Engineering: Sustaining Resilience in Software and Systems. Kelly points out the second part of the title is the most descriptive, and she is not a big fan of the Chaos term that has taken hold. They discuss: A quick description of Security Chaos Engineering Is there similarity or overlap with the CCE or CIE approach? The value of decision trees Her view of checklists of security controls like CISA's CPG Lesson 1 - "Start in...

Don Weber joins Dale Peterson to describe his IACS STAR Methodology to score the risk of a vulnerability to an ICS (or IACS in 62443-speak). It is a modification of the OWASP Risk Rating Methodology. Don has modified some of the 16-factors to create IACS STAR. The methodology and code is available on GitHub and a calculator is available on line. Don and Dale discuss: What Don likes about the OWASP Risk Rating Potential issues with putting numbers to SME judgment Differences between IACS...

Dave Whitehead, CEO of SEL, joins Dale on the show to talk about: The new SEL printed circuit board (PCB) factory in Idaho. Why they bucked the trend and did this. The benefits, the ROI, and more. SEL's position on providing SBOMs to customers and their internal use of SBOMs - Where leaders tend to go wrong. Substation shootings Market acceptance of SEL's Blueframe virtual platform Links Dave Whitehead's previous appearance on the Unsolicited Response Show Want to advertise on the...

Dale and Nicole Sundin of Axio discuss CRQ, how to deal with the precision challenge, Axio's prioritization of impact, ransomware on IT affecting operations as an example, and more. They also discuss UX and the single pane of glass. Links Axio web site

Former Congressman and Presidential candidate Will Hurd is a rarity with a tech background in someone who was elected to the US Congress, and even rarer in someone running for President. Will graduated Texas A&M with Computer Science degree. Worked as a Senior Adviser to the cybersecurity company FusionX, which was acquired by Accenture. More recently he was on the board of OpenAI. This is probably one of the most technical interviews with a Presidential candidate you will hear. Dale...

Patrick Miller of Ampere Industrial Security joins Dale to discuss the three big stories of the quarter and give their win, fail and prediction. Stories US National Cybersecurity Strategy Implementation Plan + CISA 2024-2026 Strategic Plan The cybersecurity / OT cybersecurity vendor market news. We just had Cisco buy Splunk, plus the Dragos "extension", and SCADAfence selling to Honeywell. Seems like some tough times. Ransomware again … Port of Nagoya, Clorox, hospitals, CISA...

Dale Peterson was recently interviewed by Jay Johnson of Sandia and Tom Tansy of the Sunspec Alliance as part of their distributed energy resources (DER) Sunspec webinar series. We covered a lot of issues and Dale was not shy in throwing out some analysis and opinions. After 5 minutes discussing the S4x24 ticket process, the topics discussed:   How DER will deal with the complex, large number of users and stakeholders PKI environment. The Sunspec device security specification and the...

Marina Krotofil recently published the paper Industrial Control Systems: Engineering Foundations and Cyber-Physical Attack Lifecycle which is a detailed paper on cyber attacks that cause a physical impact on the system being monitored and controlled. It took Marina 1.5 years to write this paper, which is more accurately described as a short book. We discuss: the work she is doing to help Ukrainian critical infrastructure security during wartime what got Marina interested in cyber-physical...