Industry leaders and experts gathered during the end of September at Royal Rose Hotel in Abu Dhabi to discuss common challenges and bottlenecks in industrial control systems and cyber security in the region, as well as best practices and practical options for overcoming them.
The 2014 ICS Cyber Defense for Energy & Utilities Caxton Interactive Technology Workshop is an official event of Caxton Group that brought together key industry players including regional energy operators, international speakers, independent consultants, government entities, media partners, and academic institutions to address issues on securing critical infrastructures and to highlight priorities for reform. The three-day event focused on identifying vulnerabilities in automation technology and defense essentials to effectively protect critical infrastructures from emerging cyber threats.
Ayman Al-Issa of Booz-Allen Hamilton discussed the importance of keeping abreast with the constantly evolving nature of Industrial Cyber Threats and emphasized the value of resolving conflict between IT and control staffs as well as the partnership between automation and cyber security vendors.
Dr. Ihab Ali, an industry technology leader, also gave a well-received discussion on cyber threat impacts, cyber resiliency, OT building blocks & interfaces (and its possible counter measures), OT key security functional blocks, and potential security ISO/IEC recommendations, among others. His presentation on 21 Steps to Better Security also proved to be a great take-away to the attendees to the workshop.
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Completing the powerhouse presentation line-up was this year’s Executive Committee Chairman Kevin Cardwell, Founder and CTO of CESI. Kevin’s presentation focused on SCADA and NetBios, vulnerability management, malware ecosystem, industrial control systems, ingress and egress filtering, and hardening systems. During his talk, he also demonstrated how hacking techniques could be used to expose vulnerabilities and gaps in the ICS.
The three-day event was designed to use unique case studies that yield insights about the rapidly changing role of internet and network security. This presented actionable steps for leveraging infrastructure protection across all industry verticals ,including water, electrical energy and oil and gas.
The 2015 ICS Cyber Defense for Energy & Utilities Caxton Interactive Technology Workshop, which is set to take place next year, will continue to address issues and challenges in the cyber security domain, as well as seek to discover new ways and methods that can help us prevent cyber-attacks in the industry.
For more information about this event, contact Grace Candelaria at grace.candelaria@caxtongroup.com or +971 4 276 5897.
About Caxton Group
Caxton Cyber Security is poised to be a significant contributor to the growing need of trainings in different aspects of cyber security across industries. We are committed to bring together experts on some of the most critical and significant challenges faced by the different industries with respect to their cyber security challenges.
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