James invited Matthew to keynote this year's Industrial Control Systems (ICS) Cyber Security Nuclear event in Warrington, to an audience that included Israeli cyber security experts, members of the UK's National Cyber Security Centre, part of GCHQ, and the UK Office for Nuclear Regulation. His subject was the future security of the systems that keep Critical National Infrastructure (CNI) running.
ICS ensure the safe operation of civilian nuclear power stations and energy, food, government, health and transport networks. Traditionally they were built into a plant such as Hinkley Point and left in place for thirty or so years, which, as EDF's directors and architects put it, means predicting what the world of cyber will look like in 30 years. Now these once dumb, offline systems are becoming smart and connected, including in the first fully autonomous energy grids, and air gaps are increasingly easy to infiltrate.
"We shouldn't forget there are other ways to disable CNI assets, and to be frank, so far I see no evidence of our being able to defend against what's coming."Matthew Griffin, Warrington, July 2018
Matthew pointed to Stuxnet, which destroyed over 1,000 Iranian nuclear centrifuges, and Triton, which disabled a Saudi chemical plant and had the capability to turn it into a bomb, prevented only by an accidental bug in its code. US and European government sources also say state sponsored actors are pre-positioning cyber weapons inside CNI assets. He argued that the industry's reluctance to discuss "the black art of the black arts", even in private, leaves it on the back foot.
The keynote covered the future of cyber security from advanced social engineering to Robo-hackers, self-evolving AIs, DNA malware and tools that could crack even 4,096 bit encryption. He also warned that cyber weapons are not the only way to disable CNI, and that so far he sees no evidence we can defend against what is coming. His closing call was for the industry to talk about these threats in far more depth.
