Cybersecurity as a Friend

The 62443 series of standards was jointly developed by the ISA99 Committee and the IEC TC65WG10 Committee and is dedicated to the need to design and integrate a robust and resilient CyberSecurity into industrial control systems (ICS).

The 62443 series targets:

• Improve safety, availability, integrity and confidentiality of systems used for industrial automation and process control.
• Provide objective criteria to implement the appropriate level of Security in industrial process control and management systems.

The minimum standard issued by the Swiss government is intended for providers and operators of critical and non-critical infrastructure: it is designed as a manual containing guidelines for cyber security with particular attention to the concepts of "identification", "detection", "protection", "response" and "recovery". This measure aims to increase awareness of the risks associated with cyber threats and data theft in small and medium-sized enterprises.

VPNFilter is malware designed to infect routers and certain storage devices connected to the network. It is estimated to have infected about 500,000 routers worldwide as of May 24, 2018, although this is still a downward estimate. VPNFilter Can steal data, contains a "kill switch" designed to disable the infected router on command and is able to survive rebooting the router. The FBI believes it was created by the Russian group Fancy Bear.

"Cyber Resilience" refers to an entity's ability to achieve the desired result despite adverse computer events. Cyber Resilience is a rapidly emerging concept that essentially brings together the areas of information security, business continuity and organisational resilience. The entities to which this concept is most closely linked are: IT systems, critical infrastructure, business processes, organizations, companies and national states.

Intelligent Cyber Threat refers to information about threats and their actors that help mitigate malicious events in cyberspace. Sources of cyber threat intelligence include open source intelligence, social media intelligence, human intelligence, technical intelligence, or dark and deep web intelligence.

Malware is software that is intentionally designed to cause damage to a computer, server, client or computer network. There are a wide variety of types of Malware, including computer viruses, Worm, Trojans, Ransomware, Spyware, Adware, Rogue Software and Scareware. Programs are also considered Malware if they act secretly against the interests of the computer user.

Phishing is the fraudulent attempt to obtain sensitive information such as usernames, passwords and credit card details by disguising yourself as a trusted person via email, SMS or Instant Messaging. Often the communications are so likely that the user does not distinguish the fraudulent person from the official one and trustworthyly transmits all the requested data.

Vishing is a contracted form that means "Voice Phishing". Vishing is a form of telephone fraud that uses Social Engineering through the telephone system to access private personal and financial information for profit.

"Pharming" comes from the union of the terms "Phishing" and "Farming" and is a type of computer fraud very similar to Phishing, where the traffic of a website is manipulated and confidential information is stolen. Pharming exploits the basics of how Internet surfing works: the sequence of letters that form an Internet address, such as www.google.com, is converted into an IP address by a DNS server so that a connection can be established.

The Vulnerability Assestment is the process of identification, quantification and prioritization (or classification) of the vulnerabilities of a system, in our case computer science. Classifying risks and vulnerabilities of corporate information systems means performing a very thorough scanning that highlights the company's exposure to risks related to a possible cyber attack.

The Cybersecurity Framework developed by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) provides a framework of cybersecurity guidelines on how private sector organizations in the United States can assess and improve their ability to prevent, detect and respond to cyber attacks. Translated into many languages and also used by the Japanese and Israeli governments, the latest release of the framework includes a guide on how to perform self-assessments, guidance on how to manage risk in the supply chain, a manual on how to interact with stakeholders, and encouraging the disclosure of the most common vulnerabilities.