China wants to target critical infrastructure like water facilities and energy grids, FBI director said
Chinese state-sponsored hackers have conducted widespread cyberattacks on critical American infrastructure in recent years, intending to give the country the ability to cause “a devastating blow” against the US, according to FBI Director Christopher Wray.
“The fact is, the PRC [People’s Republic of China] targeting of our critical infrastructure is both broad and unrelenting,” he told a security conference in Nashville on Thursday, describing China’s hacking programme as growing in strength.
“It’s using that mass, those numbers, to give itself the ability to physically wreak havoc on our critical infrastructure at a time of its choosing,” he added.
Last year, security analysts at Microsoft identified mysterious code linked to communications systems in Guam, the US territory in the Pacific with a massive strategic air base.
Officials believe the code was the work of Volt Typhoon, a Chinese state-sponsored hacking group.
Sometimes an airgap isn’t enough (Stuxnet is a good example), but realistically cybersecurity is an afterthought unfortunately. Simply go onto Shodan and lookup Schneider or Allen-Bradley to see how many of these controllers are accessible directly from the internet
Dont understate the effectiveness of offline networks.
Nah man, this is my game, air gap systems aren’t really a thing for anything non-military anymore. Companies want a real-time view into their production for making business decisions.
There are ways to secure your control systems network properly without a full airgap with proper boundary controls between the various layers of your Purdue model as well as fully separate Active Directories just to make a start.
Its actually an entire independent cybersecurity specialisation for OT networks. For anyone who is interested I would recommend Hacking Exposed Industrial Control Systems: ICS and SCADA Security Secrets & Solutions by Clint Bodungen its a fantastic read and very easy to follow.
Now the concept of air gapping still exists in this architecture, its designed to be able to “Island” which is where you break the connection between your corporate and OT networks when an incident has occurred on the corporate side essentially creating an airgap.
Essentially vs actually is conflation. Zero trust and segmentation is marketing. If its connected its vulnerable. value just determines when. if you really are in the industry the big vulnerability everyone has been talking about last week is evidence enough to the fact.
Oh yea poor old Palo Alto Networks is having a rough time at the moment. But a mature OT network has implemented defence in depth correctly and have a plan in place for incidents such as this one should they occur. I know a few sites who have had to island until they were able to put vulnerability mitigation in place, the good thing is that they could do this without disrupting their OT operations significantly. What you’re saying is correct, if its connected its only a matter of when not if, but you design your system with this in mind.
At the end of the day corporations are going to want business data from your site, and we need to design around that. To fight it and just air gap is going to result in you getting side stepped and your system being even more vulnerable. It’s going to happen either way so we need to make sure we have the plans in place to implement it as safely as possible.