Saturday, August 26, 2017

The Cassandra Coefficient and ICS Cyper - Some Thoughts

Do you have a idea what "The Cassandra Coefficient" is all about and how it relates to ICS cyber security? Joe Weiss discusses the issues in a recent publication:

Cassandra coefficient and ICS cyber – is this why the system is broken

Brief extract from the publication:
Joe Weiss writes: " ... What I have found is that each time another IT cyber event occurs more attention goes to the IT at the expense of ICS cyber security. The other common theme is “wait until something big happens or something happens to me, then we can take action”. Because there are minimal ICS cyber forensics and appropriate training at the control system layer (not just the network), there are very few publicly documented ICS cyber cases. However, I have been able to document more than 950 actual cases resulting in more than 1,000 deaths and more than $50 Billion in direct damages. I was recently at a major end-user where I was to give a seminar. The evening before I had dinner with their OT cyber security expert who mentioned he had been involved in an actual malicious ICS cyber security event that affected their facilities. For various reasons the event was not documented. Consequently, everyone from the end-user, other that the OT cyber expert involved, were unaware of a major ICS cyber event that occurred in their own company. So much for information sharing."

My personal experience in this and in many other areas is: People tend to hide information instead of sharing information. I found many times that SCADA experts do not really talk to RTU people, substation automation or protection engineers ... and not at all to the people that are responsible for the communication infrastructure. Most engineers likely tend to focus on their (restricted) tasks and not looking at the SYSTEM and its lifetime. Am I contributing to solve the challenges to build a quite secure system - or am I part of the problem?

I repeat what I have said many times: Teamwork makes the dream work! Become a team player!

Click HERE for the publication.

This publication is worth to read ... some definition of what Cassandra Coefficient is could be found HERE.

No comments: