Éireann Leverett will host the Hack Chat on Wednesday, July 14 at noon Pacific.
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As a society, we've learned a lot of hard lessons over the last year and a half or so. But one of the strongest lessons we've faced is the true fragility of our infrastructure. The crumbling buildings and bridges and their tragic consequences are one thing, but along with attacks on the food and energy supply chains, it's clear that our systems are at the most vulnerable as their complexity increases.
And boy, are we good at making complex systems! In the United States alone, millions of miles of cables and pipelines stitch the country together from one coast to the other, much of it installed in remote and rugged places. Such far-flung systems require monitoring and control, which is the job of supervisory control and data acquisition, or SCADA, systems. Industrial Control Systems is another moniker with a large overlap to SCADA.These networks have grown along with the infrastructure, often in a somewhat ad hoc manner, and given their nature they can be tempting targets for threat actors.
Finding ways to secure such systems is very much on Éireann Leverett's mind. As a Senior Risk Researcher at the University of Cambridge, he knows about the threats to our infrastructure and works to find ways to mitigate them, or predict the impacts. He's in the top ten most-cited cyber risk authors according to Google Scholar, but he's not just an academic! He is also a founder of two companies specializing in cyber risk: Concinnity Risks and Waratah.io.
His book Solving Cyber Risk lays out a framework for protecting IT infrastructure in general. For this Hack Chat, Éireann will be addressing the special needs of SCADA system, and how best to protect these networks. Drop by with your questions about infrastructure automation, mitigating cyber risks, and what it takes to protect the endless web of pipes and wires we all need to survive.
