Executive Order 14028 on Improving the Nation's Cybersecurity was issued in May of 2021 and provided a roadmap for a series of regulatory initiatives that government agencies (and anyone doing business with them) should prepare for. Recently we’ve seen the rollout of two important mandates:
Today, reporters Betsy Woodruff Swan and Eric Geller at Politico published a story: “BlackBerry resisted announcing major flaw in software powering cars, hospital equipment.” They outline how BlackBerry willfully hid the fact that their key operating system QNX contained a collection of vulnerabilities (originally discovered and named BadAlloc by Microsoft). It seems other companies affected by BadAlloc announced the issue way back in May. Not so...
In today’s blog post I’d like to recognize all the hard work done by NTIA (National Telecommunications and Information Administration) and congratulate them on publishing the minimum elements for a Software Bill of Materials… more commonly referred to as an SBOM. In particular, I’d like to give a shout-out to Allan Friedman who has been championing the SBOM cause for some time now. It’s good to see his committed effort captured in this comprehensive...
Section 3: Modernizing Federal Government Cybersecurity of the Executive Order is all about government agencies moving to the cloud and doing it right. If you are someone who believes that the cloud has absolutely no place in the industrial control systems (ICS) world, you are going to hate this section.
Today’s blog is going to take a break from analyzing a specific section of the Executive Order on Improving the Nation’s Cybersecurity and focus on who will be impacted by the order.
I got thinking about this last week when Tom Clary posted this insightful comment on LinkedIn:
[This] Executive Order in no way compels private sector critical infrastructure to do anything different. It seems intended to better protect...
On Friday we dissected Section 4: Enhancing Software Supply Chain Security of the new Executive Order on Improving the Nation’s Cybersecurity. Today we will look at Section 2: Removing Barriers to Sharing Threat Information. We’ve also updated the EO14028 Timeline I posted previously to include Section 2 deadlines:
Late Wednesday night President Biden signed the Executive Order on Improving the Nation’s Cybersecurity.
Compared to any Executive Order (EO) I’ve seen, this is a massive and complex policy document: the average length of an EO has been under 3½ pages; most are just 1 or 2 pages. This EO weighs in at 18 pages with 74 actionable directives. Forty-five of those directives have defined due dates, many linked to the completion of other directives....
Wrapping up my year on December 31, I was delighted to join ICS cybersecurity luminary Dale Peterson for his December: ICS Security Month in Review episode of the Unsolicited Response Podcast. Dale was kind enough to invite me on to discuss the big stories of December 2020 and to throw out some predictions on what’s in store for us in 2021. Here I’ll present a quick teaser of our discussion; I encourage you to listen to the full podcast.
Just in case you missed it, a software supply chain attack on the US government and industries is consuming the waking hours of everyone involved in cyber security this week. The attack involved the insertion of a compromised DLL infected with the SUNBURST malware directly into the DevOps environment of SolarWinds’ Orion network monitoring and management software. It was a cunning and subtle infiltration: the package was signed with a valid...
Interesting times lead to interesting opportunities. The current pandemic is proving no exception, but, sadly, it’s an opportunity for some attackers who have laid a rather cunning trap. As you no doubt know, supply chain security typically focuses on firmware and installers. However, in the course of researching vendor documentation, we saw a clever technique being utilized by attackers targeting critical infrastructure and industrial asset owners.