Author Archives: Venkat Pothamsetty

Top 10 Recommendations for OT Compliance Managers On Change Management

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Change management is on top of mind for most compliance managers in Operational Technology (OT) driven industries. The following are Top 10 practical recommendations that have worked with our customers’ compliance managers who are trying to push technologies and processes around change management. 10. Start with Large Breadth of Use Cases on a Small Depth of Hosts The Compliance Manager should start with the complete breadth of technical and business use cases he wants to cover as part of the << More >>

Shamoon – Options for Critical Infrastructure

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Saudi Aramco recently got hit with a targeted virus infecting several of its computers, replacing critical files on the assets with an image. Though the particular attack is targeted at Saudi Aramco, Shamoon highlights the need for the Critical Infrastructure (CI) operators such as those in energy, pipeline, gas, and utilities to carefully look at their security postures and prepare to prevent, mitigate and survive such attacks. Fortunately there are a few simple actions that can be taken right << More >>

RuggedCom SSL Vulnerability Mitigations – Are PCN Best Practice Architectures the Safe Bet ?

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ICS CERT recently issued a warning on SSL key management private keys stored in the operating system causes an attacker to decrypt the communications to the RuggedCom device. Which Devices Might be Affected ? The reported vulnerability is in ROS SSL, so it means that only  web management of Rugged’s switches and some other small devices such as terminal servers might be affected by the vulnerability. What does the Vulnerability Mean ? A hard-coded private key means that every device running R << More >>

Silver Springs Cloud Services – Tipping Point for Utility Cloud Services ?

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Silver Springs officially announced the cloud services for management of the meter networks [1] . Several of us have predicted this happening though there were several factors which were slowing the trend. The facts are simple – Utilities have started deploying networks at a scale that they have never deployed before at a very rapid scale and there is very little chance that the ramp up in skill set to manage the operations will match to the scale of deployments. Outsourcing in the utility << More >>

Flame and Stuxnet – What Should the Strategic Response of a CI Operator Be?

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The CI operators started responding to the Flame virus by focusing on signatures for Flame. While that makes sense and is a viable tactical response and the operators should continue to do it, the following items need more attention strategically - The architecture of Flame is highly modifiable and therefore its likely that variants of Flame are already in the wild [1]. Several AV vendors made a good case that AV is a wrong path to look out for sophisticated viruses [2] Flame also exploits a << More >>