Near the end of a warm summer day, an engineer monitors the flow of process materials at a chemical manufacturing plant. On his screen, the engineer watches a valve switch from open to closed. He's confused. It's not supposed to close -- not on its own. The plant is under cyber attack, and, as the engineer soon learns, the closing valve is just the first failure. Organizations frequently (and appropriately) spend a lot of time and effort on the technical aspects of operations. But the catastrophe about to unfold was caused just as much by weaknesses in plans and procedures. In this blog post, I’ll walk through the technical vulnerabilities -- and the perhaps more surprising process maturity vulnerabilities -- that led to the disaster, talk about why they’re so important for any organization, and suggest some tried-and-true mitigations.
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