Attacks on Critical Infrastructure Networks as a Component of Economic Warfare

No ratings

Presented at ISSA 2019 by

Galina Antova

This talk will explore how, in the event of conflict escalation between the US and a nation state adversary, attacks on OT networks can be used as a powerful weapon of economic warfare. OT networks run the world's infrastructure - from oil refineries and nuclear power plants to industrial processes across chemical plants, pharmaceuticals. Compared to traditional IT networks, those OT networks are largely invisible to security teams and lag significantly when it comes to the security controls deployed. Given the relative lack of telemetry from those OT networks, we simply don't know how many critical networks have been breached. There are only a handful of publicly disclosed OT attacks, but we should not take this absence of evidence for evidence of the absence of the adversaries in those networks. Russian government threat actors have been targeting multiple critical infrastructure sectors including the energy, nuclear, commercial facilities, water, aviation, and critical manufacturing sectors for few years and it's likely that what we’re witnessing are the early stages recon / infiltration where the adversaries are getting into position.