To help provide a flavor of the insights and experience that Tripwire makes available, we’re conducting one-on-one interviews with several Tripwire in-house experts. You may have seen some of their bylines in Belden’s industrial blog over the past couple of years, but in this new series we want to provide a more direct glimpse into each expert’s individual industry purview. Each of them will discuss their own personal views on the current state of cyber security in the industrial environment. You’ll learn more about how they have been working with Belden industrial customers to help bolster their network security and optimize their uptime in today’s challenging environment.

To help provide a flavor of the insights and experience that Tripwire makes available, we’re conducting one-on-one interviews with several Tripwire in-house experts. You may have seen some of their bylines in Belden’s industrial blog over the past couple of years, but in this new series we want to provide a more direct glimpse into each expert’s individual industry purview. Each of them will discuss their own personal views on the current state of cyber security in the industrial environment. You’ll learn more about how they have been working with Belden industrial customers to help bolster their network security and optimize their uptime in today’s challenging environment. We will present a new interview, each featuring a different expert, every other month.

Let's face it, we Operations Technology (OT) folks can sometimes get a little bit smug when the news of the latest IT cyber security event hits the airwaves. “We don't store credit card information or social security numbers,” some might be thinking, “so no one would be interested in targeting us.”

Many of us are familiar with the infamous video of the hacking at the Ukrainian power station in December, 2015 that caused a blackout impacting a quarter million people in the area. As the hackers remotely took control of their workstations, the plant systems operators could do little more than record for posterity the activity that they saw on their PC screens with their mobile phones. So now, any of us can go over to YouTube and watch in horror along with the operators as their cursor moves around their screen, maliciously clicking commands and tripping breakers in various substations. Of significant interest, as they helplessly watch the screen activity that was advancing their power station inevitably toward doom, we hear one operator say to the other “We should call the IT guys,” to which his colleague quickly replies “What if it’s the IT guys doing this?”

Digital attackers are targeting organizations in the energy sector like never before. For example, just a few weeks ago, the FBI and Department of Homeland Security issued a joint report describing a massive Russian hacking campaign to infiltrate America’s critical infrastructure. In a first, the US government publicly blamed Russia’s government for attacks on energy infrastructure.