Successful mitigation of today’s security threats requires an approach that is both on the offensive and on the defensive. Here, we give our take on how to approach and handle specific security challenges, as well as our reaction to some of the latest industry topics.
Three areas to secure to ensure your critical infrastructure isn’t vulnerable to a Machine-in-the-Middle (MitM) attack. A multinational corporation in the energy industry enlisted our services to perform a comprehensive security assessment of their XRT Merging Unit. The merging unit sits on the power grid and is responsible for taking battery data from the company’s… Read more »
Avoid these three pitfalls that are inherent to most SCADA systems that manage critical infrastructure. A multinational corporation enlisted the services of DirectDefense to perform a security assessment of the organization’s newly-developed battery energy storage control (BESS) that would enable the company’s vendors and integrators to manage the voltage and power output for massive batteries.… Read more »
Security company Qualys has uncovered a truly dangerous memory corruption vulnerability in polkit’s pkexec, CVE-2021-4034, dubbed “PwnKit”. Polkit, formerly known as PolicyKit, is a systemd SUID-root program. It’s installed by default in every major Linux distribution, which means that tens of millions of devices are vulnerable to this easily-exploitable bug. What makes this flaw even… Read more »
12.09.21What to Know, How to Prepare, and How We Got Here When 2021 began, everything from the pandemic to the economy felt uncertain. Security threats increased both as a result of those uncertainties and the ever-growing sophistication of the threat landscape. In this post, we’ll review the events that created security threats in 2021 and… Read more »
07.26.21Newsflash: Most networks utilized for Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) were not designed to be secure. Yes, you read that correctly. Kind of a scary thought, especially when your municipal water utility is reliant on this network to ensure the availability and safety of the drinking water supply! This is why the management company… Read more »
Greater Security Must be Applied to all Operational Technology Systems The Colonial Pipeline shutdown, caused by a ransomware attack, highlights the precarious position of many critical infrastructures. The effects of the pipeline cyber incident are widespread, as 45% of the U.S. East Coast relies on it for gasoline, diesel fuel and jet fuel. Several southern… Read more »
02.09.21If you don’t want to issue the dreaded boil-water advisory then make sure your wireless network is hacker- proof. How our team was able to drive up to a municipal water utility, join the wireless SCADA network and gain the access needed to do some major damage to the water supply – all in 10… Read more »
