Tenable Blog

In November 2013, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) approved Version 5 of the NERC CIP (Critical Infrastructure Protection) standards, which provides a significant change from Version 3 of the CIP standards and completely bypasses the implementation of the proposed Version 4. A Transition Program will be used during the implementation of Version 5, which will be fully enforced beginning on April 1, 2016. Additional information about the Transition Program is on the official NERC website.

In February of this year, I published an article in SC Magazine called The Security Model is Broken. Because every organization is susceptible to a breach, we must rethink our security models and implement better preventive measures. That first article outlined some of the technologies and controls that enterprises should use to strengthen their security postures.

Last month, we worked with Vanson Bourne, the renowned research company, to understand the current state of cybersecurity in the UK and Germany. We posed twenty questions to over 400 organisations.

Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition, or SCADA, security has been in the spotlight a lot recently. In the past few months, we have seen an increasing amount of specialized malware specifically targeting SCADA systems. Malware that was previously focused on banking software has been modified to also affect Integrated Control Systems (ICS), and other examples of malware have been created specifically to target ICSs.

Every major breach starts with a reconnaissance effort, which usually involves a port scan. It’s therefore safe to assume that port scans are the most likely precursor to an attack, and yet results from a port scan are rarely viewed with the same level of urgency as some other high profile vulnerabilities. It’s time to take a different approach and to have a policy-based approach for open ports.

The result from a port scan is just another result buried under a million other results