Utilities Industry in the Cyber Targeting Scope
There's often a lot of rhetoric in the press and in the security community around threats to the utilities industry, and risk exposure surrounding critical infrastructure. We've determined that the utilities industry (power, water, waste) has been, and likely will continue to be, a target for cyber espionage primarily from Chinese APT groups. We also anticipate that U.S. utilities infrastructure is vulnerable to computer network attack (CNA) from a variety of threat actors motivated by a desire to disrupt, deny access, or destroy. It's important to recognize the difference between actors seeking to steal data or intellectual property, and actors seeking to destroy systems or cause mass destruction. Often the distinction between computer network exploitation (CNE) and CNA gets lost in media coverage that bundles diverse cyber activity together. The type of cyber activity has implications for how we tackle the problem, thus it's key to distinguish.
