Aperture: A Claroty Podcast

Andrew Ohrt, the resilience practice area lead at West Yost, joins the Nexus Podcast to discuss cyber-informed engineering (CIE) and how it informs engineers and asset operators to understand their role in creating and maintaining a cyber resilient organization. According to Ohrt, CIE is one of the best examples of delivering cybersecurity concepts to non-security teams, speaking to them in their language, and avoiding the often-intimidating jargon that can dominate cybersecurity discussions.Listen to the Nexus Podcast on your favorite podcast platform.

Megan Stifel, Chief Strategy Officer for the Institute for Security and Technology, joins the Nexus Podcast to discuss the four years of progress and challenges experienced by the Ransomware Task Force. The RTF was created days before the Colonial Pipeline ransomware incident and in a landmark report, laid out 48 recommendations to the industry that included a framework for critical infrastructure organizations that could help deter and disrupt the operations of ransomware gangs. Stifel covers the growth of the task force and which the of the 48 recommendations have been tackled and which remain. Listen and subscribe to the Nexus Podcast on your favorite platform.

Security researcher Joe Slowik joins the Nexus Podcast to discuss the broad interpretation of what critical infrastructure entities are truly "critical," and how that creates an ethical wedge between protecting the well-resourced and those that are resource-strapped. Slowik acknowledges that while calling everything "critical" ensures that nothing is critical, serious discussions must be had about getting the most return in terms of defensive resources while recognizing the ethical dilemmas that some entities cannot be left behind because they're not as important to overall national and economic security. Listen and subscribe to the Nexus Podcast on your favorite platform.

Danielle Jablanski, Industrial Control Systems Strategist & Subject Matter Expert at CISA, joins the Nexus podcast to discuss her perspectives on critical infrastructure protection and government's role as a cybersecurity partner on implementation guidance and enablement. Danielle touches on a number of areas of CI security and protection, ranging from the challenges arising from the high percentage of private sector ownership of critical infrastructure, to the assistance available from CISA and other agencies to lesser-resourced entities in the 16 CI sectors. Listen and subscribe to the Nexus Podcast on your favorite platform.

Schneider Electric Vice President of Supply Chain Security Cassie Crossley joins the Nexus Podcast to discuss the nuances of hardware security and the growing need for hardware bills of materials (HBOMs) within critical infrastructure.Cassie covers the use cases and features that matter most within an HBOM, some of the threats and weaknesses they can illuminate for users, and how they can change the current status quo for CI sectors that have concerns about the provenance of hardware components and the threats they pose. Cassie is an experienced cybersecurity technology executive in information technology and product development and author of “Software Supply Chain Security: Securing the End-to-End Supply Chain for Software, Firmware, and Hardware.”Listen and subscribe to the Nexus Podcast here. 

Rapid7 Senior Director of Threat Analytics Christiaan Beek joins the Nexus Podcast to discuss the technical evolution and economic models that maintain ransomware's viability among threat actors. Ransomware became a for-profit threat more than a decade ago and has progressed into the No. 1 threat facing many critical infrastructure organizations. In this episode, Beek covers extortion characteristics, the stealthiness of some attacks, and how the future may include hardware-based ransomware that maintains indefinite persistence. Follow and subscribe to the Nexus Podcast. 

Florence Hudson, working group chair of the IEEE/UL 2933 standard and framework for Clinical IOT Data and Device Interoperability with TIPPSS, joins the Nexus Podcast. Published last September, the standard establishes a framework for secure data exchanges between clinical IoT and medical devices and systems. The frameworks is based on TIPPSS principles (trust, identity, privacy, protection, safety, and security) clinical IoT such as in-hospital devices, wearable devices, investigational devices.Follow and subscribe to the Nexus Podcast.

Mike Holcomb, global lead for ICS and OT cybersecurity at Fluor, joins the Nexus Podcast to discuss his advocacy and efforts to educate engineers and IT cybersecurity professionals in the nuances of protecting operational technology and industrial control systems. Mike produces and hosts a learning series available for free on YouTube called "Getting Started in ICS/OT Cyber Security" where he explains the fundamentals of this unique cybersecurity discipline On the podcast, he discusses his experience with those in IT now responsible for OT, how to best assess and mitigate risk within OT, and some of the practical threats that matter most to practitioners. Follow the Nexus Podcast here.

Ron Fabela of ABS Consulting joins the Nexus Podcast to dispel some of the myths surrounding threat actors targeting operational technology and industrial control systems. Groups such as the Russian Cyber Army, UserSec, and the CyberAv3ngers have different ideological motivations, and have decidedly carried out low-impact attacks on OT. Fabela covers some of their tactics, whether they're better marketers than hackers, and reminds users that their exploits still merit investigation and remediation. Listen to every episode of the Nexus Podcast here. 

Munish Walther-Puri of the Center for Global Affairs at New York University joins the Claroty Nexus podcast to discuss a homegrown severity scale for critical infrastructure cybersecurity incidents. The Infrastructure Cyber Incident Scale, or INCI Scale, brings a Richter-Scale-like criticality index to incidents based on the intensity, magnitude, and duration of an event. Walther-Puri unveiled the scale at the S4 Conference in Tampa. 

Brian Foster, Senior Advisor for Grid Security at Southern California Edison, joins the Nexus Podcast to discuss a presentation he gave at the S4 Conference called . Foster covers the impending risk and host of exposures expected as smart meters and other similar devices are centrally managed online. This scenario gives attackers the ability to attack devices at scale and potentially cause catastrophic damage. Listen to every episode of the Nexus Podcast here. 

Matthew Rogers, ICS Cybersecurity Strategy & R&D Lead at the Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) joins the Nexus Podcast to discuss the agency's latest publication: “Secure by Demand: Priority Considerations for Operational Technology Owners and Operators when Selecting Digital Products.” This guide features 12 cybersecurity recommendations that OT owners and operators should be looking for during procurement cycles with automation and control system vendors. Read Claroty's blog on the guide.Listen to every episode of the Nexus Podcast here. 

Claroty Team82 researcher Noam Moshe joins the Nexus Podcast to discuss the IOCONTROL malware used by an Iranian APT actor known as the CyberAv3ngers to target civilian critical infrastructure in the U.S. and Israel. The malware acts as a Linux-based backdoor and has a modular configuration that can be adapted for IoT, OT, and SCADA devices. Read Team82's research blog: "Inside a New OT/IoT Cyberweapon: IONCONTROL"Listen and subscribe to the Nexus Podcast here.

Claroty Team82's Noam Moshe and Tomer Goldschmidt join the Nexus Podcast to discuss the research team's latest publication on 10 vulnerabilities discovered in Ruijie Networks' Reyee OS cloud platform. A chain of these vulnerabilities could allow an attacker to remotely execute code on any device connected to the Ruijie cloud. Team82 also developed an attack they call Open Sesame which allows an attacker in proximity of a Ruijie device to use leaked device information and access the internal network.You can find the research here on Team82's website. Listen and subscribe to the Nexus Podcast here.

Volexity founder Steven Adair joins the Claroty Nexus Podcast to discuss the Nearest Neighbor Attack, a unique attack carried out by Russia's APT 28 against a high-value target in an attempt to gain intelligence on Ukraine prior to the start of the war in February 2022. APT 28 was able to compromise the Wi-Fi network of its target without being in physical proximity of it. They did so by remotely compromising neighboring organizations, accessing their Wi-Fi networks—creating a daisy-chain of breaches and compromises—until they were able to reach their target. Volexity's blog contains additional technical details. Listen to every episode of the Nexus Podcast here. 

Runsafe Security CEO and Cofounder Joe Saunders joins the Nexus Podcast to discuss the strategic shift from certain APTs toward destructive cyberattacks targeting U.S. critical infrastructure. Groups such as Volt Typhoon and Sandworm have aggressively focused their efforts on hacking OT, IoT, and healthcare organizations, opening new fronts that asset owners and operators, as well as manufacturers of embedded systems must now contend with. 

Claroty Chief Strategy Officer Grant Geyer joins the Nexus Podcast to discuss the results of a survey of 1,100 cybersecurity leaders and practitioners on the business impact of disruptions from cyberattacks on cyber-physical systems. The financial losses are steep from these attacks impacting connected systems that are so central to our way of life, as are the recovery costs and operational impacts such as downtime, which is often intolerable in critical industries such as manufacturing and healthcare.Geyer brings his unique insights to the discussions, including attackers' motivations in targeting CPS, why ransomware continues to impact healthcare delivery organizations, and the risks of unsecured third-party and supply chain connections to the enterprise.  Get the full survey results here. 

Bishop Fox senior security consultant Alethe Denis joins the Claroty Nexus podcast to discuss social engineering in cybersecurity and how it has become part of red-team engagements, especially inside critical infrastructure organizations. She explains the value of open source intelligence and data stolen in breaches to scammers and extortionists in creating pretexts for their schemes. She also explains how to best defend against these tactics that aid threat actors in weaponizing personal information against victims and organizations. For more, visit nexusconnect.io/podcasts.

Alon Dankner of the Technion Institute for Technology in TelAviv Israel joins the Claroty Nexus Podcast to discuss a presentation he gave at the recent Black Hat cybersecurity conference in Las Vegas. Dankner and colleague Nadav Adir's presentation looked at the attack surface of programmable logic controllers (PLCs), in particular Siemens' S7 protocol. Dankner and Adir developed six attacks against the encryption implementation in the protocol that expose private crypto keys and allow an attacker full control over the industrial control system.For more, visit nexusconnect.io/podcasts 

Claroty Team82 researcher Noam Moshe joins the Nexus Podcast to talk about Team82's research into Unitronics Vision series integrated HMI/PLC devices. The OT devices were exploited last year in attacks against water treatment facilities in the U.S. and Israel. Team82 researched the security of these devices and developed a pair of tools that allowed them to extract forensic information from the PLCs. Both tools were released to open source on Team82's Github page.Moshe also presented this research today at the Black Hat Briefings in Las Vegas. Read Team82's research blog here.Download the forensics tools here.For more, visit nexusconnect.io/podcasts 

Alexander Antukh, CISO of AboitizPower in the Philippines, the country's largest power and renewable energy provider, joins the Nexus Podcast to discuss cyber risk quantification (CRQ). CRQ is a framework used to assess the financial impact of a cybersecurity threat on an organization. Antukh is an advocate of CRQ, and discusses his approach to using it to predict risk in his organization, what level of organizational maturity is required for this approach to succeed, and how it's being applied in operational technology (OT) environments.  For more, visit nexusconnect.io/podcasts

Vincente Diaz, Threat Intelligence Strategist on Google's VirusTotal team and formerly the EU director of Kaspersky Lab's Global Research & Analysis Team, joins the Nexus Podcast to discuss how artificial intelligence and machine learning is an integral part of what VirusTotal is doing around malware analysis. Vincente describes the advantages these advanced technologies bring to malware analysis, in particular how it cuts down analysis time, and improves exploit detection. 

Ahmik Hindman, Senior Network and Security Solution Consultant at Rockwell Automation, joins the Claroty Nexus podcast to discuss the challenges and success stories he's experienced in patching operational technology equipment and industrial control systems. Hindman has been at Rockwell Automation for 28 years and has expansive experience with customers solving these complex cybersecurity issues. Hindman shares some of the frameworks, tools, and approaches he's worked with, and how convergence and other recent trends have changed how organizations handle vulnerabilities. 

Dr. Bilyana Lilly,  an expert on geopolitics and Russia's codification of information warfare as a strategy, says that the war in Ukraine has only temporarily delayed Russia's activity against the West in cyberspace. On this episode of the Nexus podcast, she reinforces the idea that despite the fact that Russia is operating under severe resource constraints, CISOs should be preparing for the inevitable. “I think it's important to identify the conditions and the constraints that currently the Russian government is currently experiencing. Because once these constraints are lifted then I think we'll see an increase in cyber activity, which gives us some time to prepare,” Lilly said. “That's what I think we should be doing right now. I think we shouldn't be letting our guard down because I think those attacks are coming.”

Bishop Fox CEO and Cofounder Vinnie Liu joins the Nexus Podcast to discuss his team's role during security incidents in conducting offensive security testing alongside incident response activities. In healthcare environments where ransomware is the leading threat, red-teams and other offensive security specialists are called in, Liu said, to ensure that secondary attack vectors cannot be leveraged by attackers to maintain persistence inside an organization. 

Protect AI Chief Information Security Officer Diana Kelly joins the Claroty Nexus podcast to discuss the intricacies of securing machine learning and artificial intelligence use inside the enterprise. She also explains the concept of MLSecOps and how it compares and contrasts to DevOps used in application development. 

Jennifer Minella, founder and principal advisor of Viszen Security,  joins the Claroty Nexus podcast to discuss her experiences advising organizations on operational technology implementations, risk management, and succeeding at IT/OT convergence. This episode was recorded during RSA Conference where Jennifer and Bryson Bort gave a talk on convergence from the perspectives of a defender of industrial networks, and from the viewpoint of an offensive security specialist. 

Charles Blauner, Team8 operating partner and CISO in residence, joins the Claroty Nexus podcast to discuss the rapid changes in responsibilities and liability risks facing today's chief information security officers. Blauner, former CISO at JP Morgan and Deutsche Bank, describes how, for example, the new SEC rules around disclosures and incidents, along with legal action against high-profile CISOs of public companies, have some security leaders re-thinking how they operate and negotiate within their roles. He also discusses whether enterprises should brace for an exodus of those in the CISO chair today. 

Cybersecurity pioneer Mikko Hypponen joins the Claroty Nexus live at the RSA Conference to discuss a decade of ransomware attacks against corporate networks. Hypponen is Chief Research Officer at WithSecure, the former F-Secure for Business. He has observed and analyzed malware from its infancy when it was a merely a means of disruption and attention-seeking to today's enormously profitable ransomware services and gangs . 

Former NSA Director Adm. Michael S. Rogers (Ret. USN) joins the Claroty Nexus Podcast live from RSA Conference in San Francisco to discuss the current geopolitical climate, its impact on chief information security officers, and how they can and should response. Rogers discusses how the doctrines of adversaries are changing and that U.S. critical infrastructure is increasingly in the crosshairs. He also brings his experience and delivers practical advice for CISOs who are not only dealing with external adversaries but also potential legal liability in the event of breaches.

Abel Archundia, chief technology officer and global head of advisory for Istari, joins the Claroty Nexus podcast to discuss the nature of complexity, technical debt, and regulation, and how it influences risk decisions in critical infrastructure environments. He explains the challenges complexity brings to manufacturing, pharmaceuticals, and other CI sectors, and how owners and operators may feel outmatched by technical debt. 

Adam Gluck, founder and CEO of Copia Automation, joins the Claroty Nexus podcast to discuss the need for DevOps within industrial automation. DevOps practices are popping up more frequently in these environments, but there are still hurdles and challenges for developers and engineers to overcome. Adam covers those, and explains how DevOps can improve disaster recovery, lessen the introduction of vulnerabilities in new code, and mitigate risk by being proactive about reviewing code changes as they happen rather than later in the development lifecycle. 

Greg Garcia, the executive director of the Healthcare and Public Health Sector Coordinating Council's Cybersecurity Working Group, joins the Claroty Nexus podcast to discuss the Change Healthcare ransomware attack and what can be done from a policy perspective to minimize the impact of such attacks in the future.Garcia has had a long career on the policy side of cybersecurity, and was the first presidentially appointed Assistant Secretary for Cybersecurity at the Department of Homeland Security. In this episode, he discusses where organizations are in terms of recovery from the impacts of the attack, longterm impacts on the healthcare sector, and how the HSCC's recently published five-year strategic plan for organizations in the crosshairs. 

Ryan Pickren, a Ph.D. student in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology, joins the Claroty Nexus podcast to discuss a recently published research paper that explains a new web-based malware attack against programmable logic controllers. Pickren, the lead author, along with colleagues Tohid Shekari, Saman Zonouz, and Raheem Beyah, explains how embedded webservers inside modern PLCs can be attacked to give remote attackers full control over the device. Check out their paper: “Compromising Industrial Processes Using Web-Based Programmable Logic Controller Malware”

Hormel Foods Chief Information Security Officer and Director of Information Security and Compliance Mike Rogers joins the Claroty Nexus podcast to discuss why it's so important for CISO's to understand their personal liability during cybersecurity incidents. New regulations, including the SEC's cybersecurity rules, are driving this need for security leadership to evaluate to manage their personal exposure. Rogers provides his perspective on the SEC rules, how incident response is changing, and the ambiguity around exactly what constitutes a "material" incident.

Noam Moshe of Claroty Team82 is back to answer more listener questions about OT vulnerability research, threats and risks to OT networks and IoT devices, and the best mitigation and remediation strategies for defenders. This is a follow-up podcast to an episode we recorded in December answering listener questions. You can listen to that episode here.

Phlow Corp., CIO Juan Piacquadio joins the Claroty Nexus podcast to discuss the application of Industry 4.0 to pharmaceuticals, also known as Pharma 4.0. The industry is quickly adopting advanced technologies such as artificial intelligence, digital twins, and augmented reality to enhance the development of medicine and improve patient care. Along with that expansion of capabilities comes a wider attack surface, and Piacquadio spends a good deal of time explaining not only the threat landscape he envisions, but also how giant pharmaceuticals, the supply chain, and security providers must respond. Subscribe to the Nexus Podcast here.

David Elfering, CISO at Carrix and former security and risk executive at Marsh, is back for another episode of the Claroty Nexus podcast to discuss cyber liability insurance. Elfering has extensive experience working not only as an enterprise cybersecurity executive, but also with one of the world's leading insurance carriers. Listen as he brings insight on that perspective, how carrier cybersecurity requirements align with risk reduction, red flags that can imperil coverage or claims, and how cyber insurance providers are looking at geopolitical conflict. 

Team82 researchers Sharon Brizinov and Noam Moshe join the Claroty podcast for a special episode where they answer questions submitted by users. This Ask-Me-Anything style of podcast covers the team's OT and IoT vulnerability research process, resources for experienced and beginner vulnerability researchers, and insights from their point of view on the threat landscape for cyber-physical systems. 

Nathan Brubaker, Mandiant and Google Cloud Head of Emerging Threats and Analytics, joins the Claroty Nexus podcast for a timely discussion on his team's report published this week on the Sandworm APT's activity in Ukraine. Sandworm leveraged a new TTP—Living off the Land techniques—to target a Ukrainian energy company in October 2022 to cause a power outage. That outage also coincided with missile attacks by Russia against critical infrastructure in Ukraine. Read Mandiant's Sandworm paper here. 

Don Weber of Cutaway Security joins the Nexus podcast to discuss a trend in control environments where asset operators and engineers keep trained cybersecurity professionals at arm's length, citing safety concerns. As more control systems are connected and managed online, it's critical for certified security professionals to be included in overall safety and reliability activities. Otherwise new risk and vulnerabilities are likely to be introduced. Weber also discusses a new methodology for assessing implementation vulnerabilities within industrial automation and control systems. Read more about IACS STAR: IACS STAR CalculatorIACS STAR GitHub

Misha Belisle and Blaine Jeffries of MITRE join the Claroty Nexus podcast to discuss  Caldera for OT, a new set of operational technology plugins for the open source core Caldera adversary emulation platform. Caldera for OT supports the Modbus, BACnet, and dnp protocols, and Belisle and Jeffries hope to add future support for additional protocols. Red and purple teams may use Caldera for OT for adversary emulation in order to understand the exposure of these protocols to attacks. Caldera for OT is available here.

Retired Pfizer Chief Information Security Officer Jim Labonty joins the podcast to discuss the operational technology (OT) security stack, and how it differs from IT. This episode provides especially important for the growing number of security leaders who are newly responsible for OT cybersecurity and the safety of cyber-physical systems. Labonty also shares his experience during his time at Pfizer in securing the development of Pfizer's Covid-19 vaccine, and how not only security of the manufacturing process took top priority, but also supply chain security. 

Stephen Reynolds, a partner at the law firm of McDermott, Will, and Emery, joins the Nexus Podcast to discuss some of the concerns and questions CISOs and other security executives may have about their personal liability and exposure during breach investigations. The short of it: Don't panic, but don't be unprepared either. In this case, preparation equates to having personal legal counsel available, and document everything during an incident.Reynolds and Eli Lilly associate VP and assistant general counsel Nick Merker presented on this topic at Black Hat under the context of the case and conviction of former Uber CISO Joe Sullivan. Sullivan was convicted of obstruction of justice and misprision of a felony for his role in covering up a breach at Uber. Reynolds cautions that CISOs always remember that corporate counsel represent the company, and any attorney-client privilege is to the company and not the individual. He also reminds leaders to document the facts and information available at the time key decisions were made during an incident.

Team82's extensive research into network attached storage devices and the ubiquitous OPC UA industrial protocol came to a head recently in Las Vegas with a pair of presentations at Black Hat USA and DEF CON disclosing vulnerabilities in Synology and Western Digital NAS cloud connections and the unveiling of a unique OPC UA exploit framework. In this episode of the Nexus podcast, researcher Noam Moshe explains how both research initiatives came to be, the implications of each for users, and how the respective ecosystems have been made safer. Read our Synology researchRead our Western Digital researchRead about our OPC UA exploit frameworkDownload the framework

In this episode of the Nexus podcast, Bishop Fox researchers Dan Petro and David Vargas explain their research into the Open Supervised Device Protocol (OSDP), meant to bring encryption to badge readers and controllers providing physical access controls at secure facilities. Petro and Vargas explain a number of protocol weaknesses and vulnerabilities that defeat OSDP's promise of encryption and security. Through the attacks they describe, they're able carry out—among others—replay or downgrade attacks, which are enabled by severe key exchange vulnerabilities or weakened crypto keys as described in the protocol.Petro and Vargas unveiled this research during a presentation at Black Hat USA in Las Vegas. 

Jennifer Lyn Walker, Director of Infrastructure Cyber Defense for the WaterISAC, joins the Nexus podcast to discuss the state of cybersecurity within the water and wastewater critical infrastructure sector. Walker explains where the cybersecurity technology, funding, and skills  gaps currently exist among smaller—and larger—water providers. She also covers recent improvements from water utilities, and what, in an ideal world, the cybersecurity industry and government could do to help. 

Kathleen Moriarty, Chief Technology Officer of the Center for Internet Security (CIS) joins the Nexus podcast to discuss CIS' recently published IoT Embedded Security Guidance. The document walks vendors, developers, DevOps professionals through the most commonly used IoT  protocols and analyzes them from a security perspective. The aim is to help vendors and developers with this selection process and assist with building security in at the protocol level. Download the guidance here.

Walter Risi, Global OT Lead and the Technology and Cyber Security Consulting leader at KPMG in Argentina, joins the Nexus podcast to discuss the CISO's journey from IT to OT. Risi explains what's driving this convergence of security disciplines, and the challenges security leaders are facing across industries. You'll also learn why resilience should be the goal of enterprise security programs, the tools and experience necessary to successfully converge IT and OT security operations, and the importance of bringing cybersecurity awareness and experience to OT engineers and operators. 

Claroty Team82's Noam Moshe joins the Nexus podcast to discuss a recent research collaboration with OTORIO looking at Teltonika's 4G industrial routers and cloud management platforms. Eight vulnerabilities were uncovered and patched by the vendor in a recent update. Moshe discusses the vulnerabilities, attack vectors involved, and the state of secure development for IIoT routers. Read Team82's report: "Triple Threat: Breaking Teltonika Routers Three Ways"

Mandiant Chief Technology Officer Charles Carmakal joins the Claroty Nexus podcast to discuss real-world threats to healthcare organizations. Mandiant has a unique vantage point as an incident response team involved in many high-profile cyberattacks. Based on that insight, Carmakal is able to comment on the conventional and opportunistic attacks healthcare delivery organizations and providers are dealing with. Some of those include multifaceted extortion as well as intellectual property theft. He also discusses whether attacks targeting medical devices are a reality.