Sport fishing, doses and the IoT (Internet of Towns)

Speak of the devil … You will remember that last week we featured the relevance ‘ransomware’, in general, and its most stellar and recent instantiation, 'Crypt0L0cker', in particular, were acquiring. It should not have to like Mr. L0cker, given that he has sent me a letter  -you know, the famous e-mail from Correos-  just a few days ago. The thing is that the anecdote served me to start my talk at the ‘Cyber Security Forum for European Utilities’ held in Amsterdam last Thursday and Friday.

Several were the topics discussed along both days, all of them of the most interest: smart grid protection (as a meeting centered in utilities deserved); outsourcing; IT and OT convergence; some real-life organizations and nations “cyber case” studies; negligence by design, the weakest link (the human factor) and other vulnerabilities; etc. Such a weak link shows itself even weaker when it comes to some specific collectives: executives’ is a textbook example, as we tried to make clear in Amsterdam. Today we insist on it again, backed by Intel Security’s data, who states that, given the growing number of spear phishing actions, executives are vulnerable before cyber attacks. Let me say “and before any other cyber incident”!

Given the tenure of the vulnerabilities and threats we are discovering everyday, it is conceivable that the mentioned sport modality will be still part of the menaces we will see in the next two to three years. (“Even more”, I would say!). Gartner bring us a forecast of such threats and recommends us a dose of resilience to mitigate them.

Speaking of dosages, today we focus on the relevance that medical equipment is getting as target, and source, of cyber sabotages. The same that you could suffer in case you locate your residence in the IoT (‘Internet of Towns’).

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