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EP 35: Outsized Kinetic Response to OT Attacks

If you knock down an email server, you could stand up a parallel server or you could find workarounds. If you knock down a factory floor, there is no real parallel, alternative to a factory floor.  Dane Grace of Brinqa talks about how the risks to OT carries with it an outsized kinetic response in the real world. For example, what would happen if someone managed to put a botnet on a defibrillator?

EP 34: Quantifying Risk in IoT and OT Systems

One of the problems with security is ROI. If I put in next gen this and next gen that and no security events happen, am I justified in making those expenditures? How do you quantify a risk like that?  Padraic O’Reilly, founder and Chief Innovation Officer at CyberSaint, walks us through the risk analysis for IoT and OT systems, and why it’s important to understand this as we secure our critical infrastructure.

EP 33: Turning EDRs and Cloud Backups to Malicious Wipers

This is the story of how a researcher turns commercial and commonly used EDRs and Cloud-based backup systems into wipers against the very data they’re designed to protect. Or Yair, security research team lead at Safe Breach, talks about his two presentations at SecTor 2023 that consider how to turn common security tools into potentially malicious weapons.

EP 32: Using ChatGPT To Perform Side Channel Attacks On Real Hardware

There’s a lot of talk about using AI and LLM in security. For example, could ChatGPT detect the vulnerable spots for power for analysis in particular pieces of code using Advanced Encryption Standard?  Witold Waligora, CEO of CloudVA, talks about his Black Hat Europe presentation, How We Taught ChatGPT-4 to Break mbedTLS AES With Side-Channel Attacks.

EP 31: How Operation Volt Typhoon Shows That IoT & OT Devices Could Be Used In Cyberwarfare

You might think that internet connected cameras would be limited in use by a bad actor. Actually such devices can be an entry point into an organization, providing yet another means of accessing the internal network. Mohammad Waqas, a field CTO at Armis, spoke at SecTor 2023 about the threat posed by IoT and OT devices in future cyberwarfare and discusses here why we need to broaden our attack surface defenses to include them. 

EP 30: Of IoT Vulnerabilities and Consumer IoT Labels

There’s a fake news report about three million internet-enabled toothbrushes contributing to a botnet. Unfortunately the mainstream media ran with the story before questioning its basic assumptions. This is a story about IoT devices and the fact that we still don’t understand how they are vulnerable. Tom Pace, co-founder and CEO of NetRise, talks about vulnerabilities inherent in the IoT space that are often misconstrued and how we need to ask more questions about the software and the hardware being used if we want to secure critical infrastructure tomorrow.

EP 29: The Rise of Smash and Grab Data Exfiltration

Ransomware groups have bifurcated with some doing pure ransomware and others going straight to extortion; it's whether the data is ransomed on your network or theirs. Nick Biasini from Cisco Talos talks about the threats he’s seeing, in particular, SapphireStealer which is open source and using GitHub to crowdsource new features.

EP 28: Why Mapping IT Security to OT Networks Doesn’t Always Work

The Purdue Model used in OT is essentially network security from the 1990s. New threats and new tech however required us to rethink that on the network side so how do we bring that new thinking to work with legacy OT systems? John Taylor of Versa Networks explains how there's a lot of implicit trust in the IoT and OT devices themselves, yet they don't have antivirus. Or firewalls. Worse, you're basically depending on the manufacturer of that device to provide security updates if necessary, and oftentimes they don't. Perhaps it’s time for a new approach such as SASE or secure access service edge.

EP 27: Cyber Physical Security As A Shared Responsibility

Flaws within the chips in our laptops, in our homes, and in our critical infrastructure could become the access one needs to steal data if not just shut down an assembly line, or hold up production of a vital resource like power or water. Josh Salmanson, senior vice president at Telos, discusses why we’re seeing more and more pre-compromised routers in critical environments today and what we might do to mitigate that in the near future.

EP 26: Securing Railroad OT Systems

Can your OT function if the IT system goes down? OT self-sufficiency is critical for infrastructure such as rail systems. Christopher Warner, from GuidePoint Security, discusses how this infrastructure resilience is important not only for the rail industry but for most of the other critical infrastructures in general.