The 8th annual Control Systems Cybersecurity USA show will take place on September 22-24th in Celebration Florida. We are pleased to have Waterfall Security Solutions, Michael Firstenberg, Director of Industrial Security join us, to discuss “Targeted Ransomware requires New Approaches to OT Cyber Risk Management.”
You can learn more about this show and the agenda by visiting the event page here.

Overview of Mr Firstenberg’s presentation:

Targeted ransomware has emerged as a major threat to industrial operations / OT systems. The Colonial Pipeline and JBS shutdowns are only the latest incident – in 2020, 53 industrial sites were shut down by targeted ransomware. The trend is likely to worsen – today’s targeted attacks use tools and techniques comparable to those used exclusively by nation states only a half decade ago.

Operational Technology (OT) cyber risk manages cyber threats to physical operations. Some enterprise security mechanisms are very costly to apply in OT systems because of extended safety, equipment protection and other OT risk management programs. We see emergency risk avoidance mechanisms which are unique to the OT space, but are under-utilized by enterprise risk management and security practitioners.

This presentation highlights three such innovative cyber risk management approaches and examines their effectiveness against the pervasive threat of targeted ransomware with particular attention on the operations risk. The presentation will outline a simple and robust approach to managing OT cyber risks, including Security PHA Review (SPR), Consequence-Driven, Cyber-Informed Engineering (CCE), and Secure Operations Technology (SEC-OT). Secure sites in the industry are improving protection for their operations by cherry-picking techniques from these new methodologies. Join us for a whirlwind tour of trends in OT and industrial operations attacks and defenses.