The growing number of cyber-attacks against both public and private utilities in recent years has led to increasing concern for one of the globe’s most critical sectors. Due in large part to the complex nature behind the infrastructure that provides basic amenities such as clean water, sewage services, natural gas, electricity, and more, utility providers have quickly found themselves in the crosshairs of malicious actors. Utility companies and threat actors alike are seeing the immense impact that a security incident can cause, and how unprepared some utility companies can be. In this blog we will cover some of the biggest issues that are affecting the utility sector, and how companies can begin to mitigate the risk associated with inadequate cyber defenses.

​BLUF: This blog series is written to provide an anecdotal history of the evolution of exploitation in cybersecurity, focused largely on network exploitations in an enterprise and couched as Luke’s perspective over his decade-long career in InfoSec.
 
In cybersecurity, we preach the importance of layered security. And being successful in implementing a layered security strategy is a matter of staying in tune with the white hat community.
A layered security strategy means you need to block high, and block low. You need your endpoint security and your intrusion detection systems (IDS), and you need to protect yourself from the low-tech abuse of misconfigurations, poor patching practices, and weak passwords.

For start-ups, small businesses, and large, multi-national organizations alike, differentiating your products and services from those of your competitors and driving home your competitive advantage to customers is crucial to success. More often than not, businesses look to promote their latest and greatest in capabilities and features when attempting to establish their competitive advantage with consumers. Yet in a time when consumer behavior is changing, the uncertainty around what can be trusted online is at an all-time high, and shoppers are constantly inundated with targeted adverts, finding or maintaining your edge in the marketplace requires new and different strategies and messages.

​BLUF: This blog series is written to provide an anecdotal history of the evolution of exploitation in cybersecurity, focused largely on network exploitations in an enterprise and couched as Luke’s perspective over his decade-long career in InfoSec.
 
In the field of cybersecurity, there’s one constant: It’s a game of cat-and-mouse. As exploits and vulnerabilities evolve, so too do vendors and defenders. While the first half of the 2010s are remembered by excessive buffer overflow attacks and the rise in the use of PowerShell-based remote execution techniques, the remainder of the decade featured new and “improved” ways to perform network exploitation.

On Oct. 23, 2018, America’s Water Infrastructure Act (AWIA) of 2018 was signed into law, essentially requiring water utilities to be better prepared for a wide range of threats. It requires water utilities to thoroughly assess their vulnerabilities to all types of natural hazards and man-made disasters and develop a detailed plan to address them.
 
Section 2013 of AWIA, through an amendment to the Safe Drinking Water Act (SDWA), introduced a new requirement for every public water system that serves more than 3,300 people to conduct a Risk and Resilience Assessment (RRA) and prepare (or revise) an Emergency Response Plan (ERP). If multiple entities are involved in water supply, treatment and distribution – such as wholesale suppliers, treatment operators and (separately owned) distribution systems – all would need to separately conduct RRAs and develop ERPs for assets under their control. Utilities are required to certify to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) that both have been completed by established statutory deadlines.

BLUF: This blog series is written to provide an anecdotal history of the evolution of exploitation in cybersecurity, focused largely on network exploitations in an enterprise and couched as Luke’s perspective over his decade-long career in InfoSec.

To best discuss the state of exploitations in cybersecurity in 2010-2015, let’s first take a brief walk back in time to put your mind in the right timeframe. The year was 2010, and…

• Top Grossing Movie – Toy Story 3
• Top Grossing Video Game – Call of Duty, Black Ops
• Super Bowl XLIV – Drew Brees’ Saints beat Peyton Manning’s Colts
• Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill
• WikiLeaks publishes their first bombshell leak
• Major Earthquake in Haiti
• Luke Exploits his First Box ()

What is an Exploitation, Anyway?
If we leave it up to Merriam Webster an ‘exploitation’ is “an act of instance of exploiting.” Because that doesn’t quite clear things up, we’ll take it one step further: “to make use of meanly or unfairly for one’s own advantage.” When it comes to cybersecurity, and in keeping things ethical, exploitation is the execution of any method or technique that can be used to accomplish one of the following:

• To gain unauthorized access to a system or information,
• To gain unauthorized privileges within an information system or organization,
• To deny, degrade, or destroy a network, information system, or similar object of importance within an organization.

With a working definition that’s more in-line with the intention of this blog, let’s explore how one can ethically exploit something or someone.