Looking Ahead: Energy Infrastructure

As the New Year kicks in, the cyber experts around the world are offering their predictions for 2019. Over the next few weeks, we’ll cover some of these as well as serve up a few of our own. For years, hackers have focused on stealing data that they could sell; things like personal information and intellectual property. But things are changing — an alarming trend recently has been the rise of attacks on infrastructure including manufacturing, energy and transportation. Looking ahead, it’s safe to say that we can expect these industrial cyber attacks to continue and even increase.

According to vArmour’s Mark Weatherford, “an Industrial Control System attack on the energy sector would geographically impact citizens in the United States. There is increasing evidence that foreign governments have been roaming around the networks of US energy companies, which is typically the kind of reconnaissance activity that precedes an attack. These attacks have happened in other countries yet there is still the misplaced mythology in many traditional energy companies that the control system environments and the common IT business environments are isolated from each other. It’s. A. Myth.”