Nexus: A Claroty Podcast

Cybersecurity and technology expert Sarah Fluchs joins the 100th episode of the Nexus Podcast to discuss the EU's Cyber Resilience Act and what it means for manufacturers of "products with digital elements" as they aim toward a 2027 compliance deadline. 

Sarah provides her insight on the regulation's essential requirements, its focus on secure-by-design and overall cyber resilience of products, and the milestones manufacturers need to hit as their compliance efforts get under way. 

Sarah also discusses her thought leadership and work in bringing cybersecurity to engineers, asset operators, and other non-security teams. It's important, she says, to...

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.

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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. 

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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. 

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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. 

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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 p...

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. 

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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.

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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...

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. 

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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. 

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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"
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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.
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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.
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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...

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.
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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.
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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.

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 popular 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.
 
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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. 
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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. 
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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...

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. 
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Protect AI Chief Information Security Officer Diana Kelley 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. 
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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. 
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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. 
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