- Cyber Attacks on the Rise (WESA — NPR): According to Pittsburgh’s NPR affiliate (WESA-FM), attacks on U.S. cyber interests affecting national and economic security are increasing in several alarming areas. Namely: level of sophistication, scale, frequency, and severity, according to the WESA article. WESA reports that the Commissioner for the Pennsylvania Public Utility Corporation (PUC) met with key agencies in Harrisburg last week in order to highlight October as Cyber Awareness Month. The meeting stressed the importance of protecting not only critical infrastructure but also personally identifiable information (PII), based on the article. The article can be found here.
- Nuclear Power Plants in ‘Culture of Denial’ over Hacking Risk (ft.com): According to an article by Sam Jones, at ft.com, officials in charge of nuclear power plants in Canada, France, Germany, Japan, the U.K., and the U.S., have not focused on cybersecurity. The article indicates that the Nuclear industry has taken significant steps to improve both overall safety as well as physical security but has done little, if anything in terms of the cyber realm. Generally speaking, there seems to be a general ‘culture of denial’ at many nuclear power plants with the feeling being that because the systems are not connected to the internet any compromise would be very difficult, according to the article. This raises a number of issues and for a discussion of intrusion across air-gapped¹ systems, see this previous blog post. The full text of the article is here.
- Arms Control for the Cyber Era (Gulf News): According to the Gulf News, the high-level talks between President Obama and President Jinping have some important implications in that it catapults cyberwar and cybersecurity in general to the forefront. The article states that here, a parallel is drawn between nuclear arms-control agreements that were reached nearly two decades after Hiroshima, and cyber arms control. While the modern internet came to fruition in the 1970s, countries are just now starting to engage in dialogue about cyber arms control, according to the article. The full article can be found here.
¹An air-gapped system is one in which the computing resources are not physically connected to the internet, hence the term “air-gapped”.
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