Cybersecurity: Feds Say Critical Infrastructure Owners Must Up Their Game

An alphabet soup of federal agencies led by CISA have issued a warning to critical infrastructure owners that they need to improve their security posture against cyberattacks on operational technology (OT) and industrial control systems (ICS).  According to a recent CybersecurityDive.com article, the bad guys targeting these systems are “unsophisticated,” but the owners of critical infrastructure assets are making things easy for them by using poor cyber hygiene.  This excerpt from the article summarizes the feds’ recommendations:

The agencies advised three major security improvements:

• Removing OT connections from the public internet, as exposed OT devices can easily be discovered through search engines that track open ports.
• Immediately changing default passwords with strong, unique passwords that are hard to guess.
• Securing remote access to OT networks, with users upgrading to a private IP network and adopting VPNs with strong passwords and phishing-resistant multifactor authentication.

The article quotes Mandiant’s Paul Shaver as saying that “the basic state of cyber hygiene in OT environments is lacking, and building a good perimeter and defendable environments should be every asset owner’s first priority.”