Join us for our next InfraGard meeting on August 15, 2018 from 1:00pm – 4:00pm at Cisco, 7025 Kit Creek Road, Morrisville, NC 27560 (Building 5). Our keynote speaker will be Chet Namboodri, Vice-President, Alliances & Business Development.

Chet brings passion—and the wisdom of two+ decades of industrial-sector experience, leadership and a win-win approach—to the ecosystem development and management of strategic partners for Nozomi Networks’ industrial cybersecurity business. Prior to Nozomi Networks, he directed sales, business development and marketing teams at Cisco Systems to achieve worldwide market leadership for industrial networking within the manufacturing sectors. Chet previously held growth, market share and profitability responsibilities for P&Ls within GE’s industrial, power, lighting and controls businesses. At GE, he was recognized by peers, partners, staff and senior executives alike for his servant-leadership, industrial solution and quality management excellence. Chet has earned a Master’s from Virginia Tech and a Bachelor’s from Clemson University in Mechanical Engineering.

Talk 1 (~45 min): Chet Namboodri – ‘Introduction to ICS (Industrial Control Systems) Cybersecurity’

Industrial control systems (ICS) are the brains, sensory and neural underpinnings of operations in the physical world. The speed, productivity and growth opportunity benefits to businesses of increasing interconnectivity—dubbed “Industrial Internet of Things”, “Industry 4.0”, amongst other terms—are converging information technology (IT) and operations technology (OT) in ways that expose new risks and vulnerabilities to ICS at an exponential rate. These exposures are rapidly rendered into attacks and threats that can have the physical consequences of public harm, business disruption and/or economic loss.

Chet will discuss and illustrate with examples the basic concepts of cybersecurity for ICS, in the context of the accelerated IT/OT convergence unique to each industrial environment:

•       A high-level introduction to industrial cybersecurity, the landscape, related ecosystems and basics of an ICS cyber strategy;

•       An overview of the variety of role-based security concerns of IT—where confidentiality, integrity and resilience reign supreme—and OT—where safety, availability and resilience trump confidentiality—as it relates to the protection of ICS; and

•       The basics of an industrial cyber-attack to critical infrastructure and defensive strategies and tools to combat those threats and secure ICS.

Talk 2 (~30 min): FBI presentation – TBA.

Talk 3 (~45 min): Chet Namboodri – ‘TRITON Safety Systems Malware: An ICS Threat Landscape Inflection Point’

In late 2017, a very sophisticated threat actor implemented the attack vector dubbed ‘TRITON’ by Nozomi Networks partner FireEye, who discovered the malware. TRITON was designed to disrupt and manipulate the critical-infrastructure industrial safety systems at a process facility.

Chet will discuss the TRITON attack framework, a milestone in cyber warfare being the first publicly-known malware that was engineered specifically to target those emergency shutdown systems and industrial protections intended to safeguard people:

•       An overview of the malware and attack framework;

•       How threat actors who engineered TRITON may have determined the equipment and firmware targeted, along with the documentation; and

•       Some insights on the advanced methods and resources the attackers used to stage with the TRITON malware.