Another process sensor incident that has killed people

I am being featured in the September issue of Top Cyber News Magazine regarding critical infrastructure cyber security. Process sensors and other control system field devices continued to be ignored by the IT and OT cyber security communities. Consequently, in preparation for the magazine issue, I had a discussion with an OT cyber security expert about my concerns with process sensor cyber security. The OT expert told me that recently two people died in an oil and gas facility because process sensors were not working correctly. It’s not that either the accident or the fatalities are concealed, but their origin as a cyber incident is systematically overlooked. This systematic gap in identifying safety incidents as being cyber-related is prevalent throughout process safety journals and accident investigations. It is not just the process industry as this systematic gap also is prevalent throughout the electric industry. There is a need for appropriate training, development of control system field device cyber forensics, and the use of machine learning of raw unfiltered sensor data as demonstrated by JDS Operational Technologies to identify cyber incidents that cannot be identified from the Windows-based HMI or other network security monitoring.