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How to keep your systems secure

Monday, February 9, 2015

Schneider Electric is not a cyber security technology provider, but more a consultancy, offering a range of different services, says Adrian Clarke, principal consultant EMEA for cyber security with Schneider Electric.

'Attacks against the energy sector are up 52 per cent from the previous 2 years,' he said.

'Patching is time critical - industrial vulnerability are exploited after they are published.'

There are hacking groups which are trying to poiso the websites of industrial control system
company, so when you download software updates, you end up getting a virus, he said.

The Stuxnet virus, perhaps most well known, was specifically designed to seek out industrial control systems, in Iran, manufactured by Siemens, with lots of centrifuges, he said. It is thought that Stuxnet got installed after someone dropped USB sticks in the company car park, with the virus on them, and a company employee plugged it into a PC, he said.

The 'Schmoo' virus managed to take over 40,000 workstations offline at Saudi and Qatar energy companies, and destroyed their master boot record.

As we move to interconnected devices, the so-called 'Internet of things', there will be even more
susceptibility to vulnerabilities, he said.

Security tools you can use include having a secure network infrastructure, having next generation firewalls, having better authentication and authorisation tools, doing whitelisting, doing back-ups, network and system monitoring, an d centralised patch management, he said.

Centralised network access control means you set centrally what devices are permitted to do.

People differ on how they define the threat. 'FBI thinks the biggest threats are state government.
UK it is more petty crime, Russian criminals.'

Why is oil and gas a target? I don't know. You have to ask, who would have an interest in damage to Saudi Aramco? We definitely see a lot of attacks on natural resources companies.

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» Schneider Electric

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