Nexus: A Claroty Podcast

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 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. 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. For more, visit nexusconnect.io/podcasts

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. For more, visit nexusconnect.io/podcasts

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.” For more, visit nexusconnect.io/podcasts

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. For more, visit nexusconnect.io/podcasts

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. For more, visit nexusconnect.io/podcasts

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. For more, visit nexusconnect.io/podcasts

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. For more, visit nexusconnect.io/podcasts

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 . For more, visit nexusconnect.io/podcasts

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. For more, visit nexusconnect.io/podcasts

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. For more, visit nexusconnect.io/podcasts

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. For more, visit nexusconnect.io/podcasts

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. For more, visit nexusconnect.io/podcasts

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” For more, visit nexusconnect.io/podcasts

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. For more, visit nexusconnect.io/podcasts