It has been well over a decade since cybersecurity professionals began warning about both nation-state and financially motivated cyber-kinetic attacks. Concerned about a cybersecurity threat that would have the potential to destroy physical assets and human lives, many looked to sound the alarm in industrial organizations, tracking the vulnerabilities that could lead to a compromise in operational technology networks.
A variety of attacks in that realm took place over the years, whether launched in nation-state conflicts across the globe or as an apparent amateur challenge. Most recently, cybercriminals who deploy ransomware targeted a large U.S. refined products pipeline system, causing disruption to its operations and making headlines across the world. The attack reportedly only affected IT networks but had the potential to spread to operational zones and upstream to the overall supply chain — an attack scenario that could be much more damaging.
Unlike many attacks on industrial organizations that have been connected to adversarial nation-states, it seems that the pipeline attack might be a cybercrime case motivated by a large bounty. The group suspected in this hit goes by the name “DarkSide.”
IBM Security X-Force data shows that ransomware has become the number one threat type X-Force responded to in 2020 accounting for 23% of actual attacks that impacted organizations. Of those, our incident response data shows 59% of attacks were double-extortion cases, where in addition to having their data encrypted, victims were also threatened with data being leaked unless they paid f ..
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