(CS)²AI Online™ Seminar: How to Balance Risk vs Reward of Distributed Industrial Control

Critical infrastructure is increasingly dispersed, unmanned, and remote due to a variety of pressures – economic, operational, and even environmental. As various operations extend outward from distributed electric generation in renewables to ever more remote oil & gas exploration, connectivity becomes critical. Yet such connectivity cannot be provided (easily or at all) through traditional means. While remote mining and related sites have long used technologies such as very small aperture terminals (VSATs), the last decade has seen a rapid increase in remote, wireless communication to monitor and even manage industrial and critical functions.

In this transition, organizations have realized immense cost savings and efficiency gains as remote operations are tied back to centralized monitoring and management locations. Yet with this development comes an equally concerning risk – attack surfaces for critical industrial operations have expanded with multiple new, and difficult to defend, touchpoints for threat actors to exploit. Moreover, risks of such expansion are not notional. Whether through indiscriminate ransomware activity or more focused destructive behavior, asset owners have already experienced drawbacks associated with extending defended perimeters to ever more remote sites through third-party networks.

We will review the threats as they exist today and in recent history, then work to determine the necessary steps asset owners and communication service providers must take to secure increasingly dispersed critical infrastructure environments. Importantly, for operational and economic reasons, the idea of a network ending at the plant boundary no longer applies, and air gaps are irrelevant. Within this new reality, organizations must first understand the risks taken in broadening operations, then work diligently to secure operations against those who mean to do us harm.

Speaker: 

Joe Slowik, Principal Critical Infrastructure Threat Intelligence Engineer at MITRE