Cyber Defense eMagazine October Edition for 2021

While the attack made headlines and led to shortages, it was certainly not the only one to cause
disruptions. So what makes this sector particularly vulnerable?
McKinsey & Company 2 has suggested three reasons based on their experience:
1. The first is the strategic infrastructure and economic value of this sector. Nation-state actors and
hacktivists can cause significant commercial and societal disruption, or use techniques, such as
ransomware to draw attention to their political agendas. With energy and utility companies under
huge pressure to maintain availability of services, they are very likely to pay ransoms. Colonial
Pipeline is reported to have paid a $4.4 million ransom.
2. Energy and utility companies are often sophisticated and geographically diverse. As a result of the
pandemic, a growing portionof the workforce is now working remotely and will continue to do so.
Decentralized cyber teams must manage an increased attack surface created by these factors, by
eliminating threats from the web, documents and email.
3. Energy and utility companies often have complex interdependencies between physical and IT
infrastructure. Cyber professionals are responsible for managing the risk posed by unique
endpoints – from new and innovative digital customer interfaces to a complex assortment of
operational technology (OT) – all of which can be possible points of vulnerability.
If they are to defend themselves against an increasing number of attacks, companies must mobilize their
capabilities to proactively prevent users, data and applications from providing an easy first point of entry
for attackers – whatever their motivation.
To achieve this, security professionals are exploring strategic approaches, such as Zero Trust and
Secure Access Service Edge, or SASE, and deploying solutions that create an ‘air gap’ between the user
and the Internet, such as secure web gateways powered by isolation.
Isolation ensures no entity can connect directly to an organisation’s devices as the first step of an attack,
even if a user clicks on a malicious link or downloads a suspicious document.
Helping energy companies
Gösgen Nuclear Power Plant in Switzerland is one of the many organizations we work with in this sector,
supporting the cybersecurity team to reduce their cyber risk level while promoting employee productivity.
This is a common balancing act for security teams who need to provide employees with Internet access
without putting the organization at risk.
A homegrown isolation solution was already deployed and proved very effective at shutting down
malware access to endpoints, but it was hard to maintain and could impact essential user productivity.
Now employees of the Gösgen Nuclear Power Plant and some of their strategic supply chain partners
have been surfing productivelyvia our isolation-powered secure web gateway.
2
https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/risk-and-resilience/our-insights/the-energy-sector-threat-how-to-addresscybersecurity-vulnerabilities
Cyber Defense eMagazine – October 2021 Edition 74
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