Attack on Critical Infrastructure a Serious Cause of Concern: Kaspersky Lab

Kaspersky Lab held a multi-city press conference focusing on Kaspersky Industrial Cybersecurity Solutions (KICS). The company brought together its senior team of experts to share their views at the gathering.

In addition to malware and targeted attacks, industrial organizations face a number of threats and risks targeting people, process, and technology. As we’ve seen in the past, underestimation of these risks could have serious consequences. Kaspersky Lab has developed a comprehensive portfolio of technologies, solutions, and services to help our customers tackle and manage many of these risks. Only cyber security companies that understand the differences between industrial systems and standard, business-oriented enterprises are able to deliver security solutions that meet the unique needs of industrial control systems and industrial infrastructure owners.

In his opening remarks, Vicente Diaz, Principal Security Researcher, Kaspersky Lab Global Research & Analysis Team said, “In the current APT landscape, India is realizing that they need to keep up with new technologies and best practices in cyber security, as there are many cyber criminals and nation-sponsored attacks targeting both companies and governmental organizations perceived as ‘low hanging fruit’ in the eyes of the attackers.”

In his welcome address, Vikram Kalkat, Senior Key Account Manager, Kaspersky Industrial Cyber Security Global Business Development, APAC Region said, “Operation technology of critical infrastructures should focus on infrastructure availability of automated systems rather than only data confidentiality. On top of that, in these cases, business risks should be addressed by the CEO or CFO of a company rather than a CIO.”

Mr. Altaf Halde, Managing Director, Kaspersky Lab - South Asia further added, “We welcome e-governance initiatives that are entirely supported by technology and it is a result of continuous investments by the IT companies in the cloud, IoT and the like. As automation technologies such as machine learning and robotics play an increasingly great role in everyday life, their potential effect on the workplace has, unsurprisingly, become a major focus of research and public concern. The discussion tends toward a guessing game: which jobs will or won’t be replaced by machines?”

Some of the key highlights of the discussions are as follows:

Global and Local Cyber threats overview

According to KSN data, Kaspersky Lab solutions detected and repelled 171,802,109 malicious attacks from online resources located in 190 countries all over the world. 45,169,524 unique URLs were recognized as malicious by web antivirus components. Apart from that, Kaspersky Lab’s web antivirus detected 12,657,673 unique malicious objects: scripts, exploits, executable files, etc

Attempted infections by malware that aims to steal money via online access to bank accounts were registered on 1,198,264 user computers. Crypto ransomware attacks were blocked on 821,865 computers of unique users. A total of 116,469,744 unique malicious and potentially unwanted objects were detected.

Cyber security culture in an ICS/SCADA environment

The modern ICS network infrastructure is insecure by design. It has a long utilization cycle of 15 years or more. Modern cyber security threats are sophisticated, causing catastrophic damage when penetrating ICS networks.

Energy, oil and gas and critical manufacturing industries are most affected by cyber security threats and we learned from a cyber security incident in the Ukraine that a mediocre phishing attack, which started in spring of 2015, ended up with about 200,000 customers losing power for hours, disabling SCADA automation for weeks.

Critical infrastructure: a role model to protect normal businesses?

The most important part of every organization towards security is the need to have the right attitude. When you know that the wrong software update can cause so much damage and losses of thousands of rupees per minute, you have to alter your approach.

Traditional IT is usually more relaxed, although it is possible to lose anything from $66K (SMBs) to $1,4M (enterprises) due to downtime from a security incident. Given this, adopting a ‘critical’ attitude when thinking about IT security seems to be a wise choice.