Cisco Systems, Inc. (CSCO) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

July 15, 2020

NASDAQ US Information Technology Communications Equipment conference_presentation 61 min

Earnings Call Speaker Segments

Carol Auth;SANS Institute;Webcast Facilitator

attendee
#1

Good morning, and welcome to today's SANS webcast, ICS Asset Identification: It's More Than Just Security, a SANS panel discussion. Sponsored by Cisco, Palo Alto Networks and Tenable. My name is Carol Auth at SANS. Today's featured speakers are Mark Bristow, a certified SANS instructor for the ICS515 course. He will be moderating today's webcast. Marc Blackmer, Product Manager for IoT Security at Cisco; Marty Edwards, Vice President of Operational Technology Security at Tenable; and Del Rodillas, Director of OT Industry Solutions at Palo Alto Networks. [Operator Instructions] Please note that this webcast is being recorded, and a copy of the slides and recording of this webcast will be available for viewing later today and can be found on the SANS registration page. And with that, I'd like to turn the webcast over to Mark.

Mark Bristow;SANS Institute;Certified SANS Instructor

attendee
#2

Thanks very much, Carol, and thanks to Marc, Marty and Del for joining me today on this. We've got a really important topic. And thank you for everyone who has joined us today to listen to this panel discussion. So a couple of weeks ago, we put out a paper from SANS that -- the links there and the slides if you are already familiar. Talking about a really critical topic of asset identification and talking about not only how we do asset identification, the types of methods of asset identifications or physical inspection been passive, discovery configuration analysis and using active techniques. But ways that you can boot-start your program on a budget, things like starting small, scoping the environment, defining the data points, I understand you have that lexicon, kind of what data sources can you grab that you already have or may already have, how do you plan to scale, how do you leverage tools in order to support you in this. Just really talked about a lot of the different ways that we can bootstrap and bring that asset identification program up. But really, maybe more importantly, we talked about what are the benefits of cybersecurity doing asset identification, right? Obviously, this supports your cybersecurity efforts in that kind of, "protect, detect, respond, recover" framework where you're -- you all can make sure that you have covered your vulnerabilities. As we were discussing before, the webcast, just a whole bunch of those vulnerabilities kind of seem to be coming at pace these days, at least on the IT side. How can you detect, how do you know you can't really protect things you don't know you have? How you can accelerate your response times in cyber incident response and how you can recover better are some of the key things that we talked about on paper. But one of the things that is really under-addressed in the community, and I talked about on the webcast for the paper is that we need to be more effective at communicating to our key stakeholders on the business side about how there are 9 cyber benefits that actually can positively affect the bottom line of the organization, how can we -- how can better asset identification give us better mean time to recovery, better failure analysis, how can it increase our safety factors. Those little key things about how we can articulate value to the business beyond cybersecurity, I think, is something that is really critical to really secure the resources needed to get your cybersecurity asset identification program bootstrap. So we covered a lot in the paper, and just kind of want to really -- just recap some of those things there. But really, you're not necessarily here to hear from me all day today. It's really kind of get this out to our panelists and get some other perspectives on how this -- how to get these programs going.

Mark Bristow;SANS Institute;Certified SANS Instructor

attendee
#3

So we've got a couple of quick questions that we have set up. [Operator Instructions] But the first thing, the TF question that I want to put up. And Marc, if you can address this one first for me, that would be great. We talked a lot about -- in the paper about the value-add for not just security, but how do we show the business to value the business? And the cybersecurity kind of is an accepted thing, but what non-cybersecurity value do you think a comprehensive asset identification program provides, from your perspective, Marc?

Marc Blackmer;Cisco;Product Manager for IoT Security

executive
#4

Yes, sure. I would actually even -- the way I kind of look at it, which may sound odd from a security guys to invert that, you're going to end up with better security if you're doing the foundational things well. So I look at it, number one, for asset identification as being key to the business. I mean, I think how do you make sure you're running efficiently if you're not even aware of what you have? So I think just from that perspective of just understanding what you have in the environment is helpful from a process perspective, from a business perspective. Looking at that, too, just even you think dealing with support and contracts and things like that, if I know I've got a PLC with firmware that is out of date and I can't get support for, that as -- well, I don't say nothing to do with security, but the first thought is, if I can't get support on my devices, then I have a problem. And of course, then we're looking at vulnerabilities and things like that if something's out of date. So I really see that as just being core to being able to run your business, run your operations efficiently. And then, well -- then security is going to come out of that, good security is going to come out of that. So that's how I tend to look at it.

Mark Bristow;SANS Institute;Certified SANS Instructor

attendee
#5

Yes. Great. I think that, that's a really good point about how this is really fundamental to just the efficient operations of our environment. That's -- yes, perhaps -- certainly it's a great way to look at it. How about your perspective, Marty, what do you see as a key value-add here?

Marty Edwards;Tenable;VP of Operational Technology Security

attendee
#6

Yes. Very similar to Marc, but the way that I tend to articulate it is that if you look in an industrial plant, at something like rotating machinery, I mean we have lube oil -- lubrication analysis programs where they're scheduled and predictive and proactive maintenance routines that you perform on these expensive machines. And I believe we have to have something similar in cyber. So I tend to call this cyber maintenance, right? So having real-time data on your assets, so it's not just the identification part, but it's having that real-time data feed on how your assets, your cyber assets are performing can really help you from an optimization and economics perspective within the plant. You also referred to the recovery time from a failure. So being able to go into these kinds of systems and determine the causality of something, was this a mistake somebody made in misconfiguring a device or was this an actual cyber incident can help you recover a lot faster. And I think that those are really tangible nonsecurity benefits that go right to the ROI of these types of investments. So I think that we've kind of mis-sold this in the whole security space that, "Oh, yes, these defensive kind of technologies really don't have ROI." And I think when you look at it outside the context of security, they certainly do.

Mark Bristow;SANS Institute;Certified SANS Instructor

attendee
#7

Yes, Marty. I think that's a great point. I like that cyber maintenance kind of lexicon. It really, I think, it's something that our operators are already well familiar with how you have to do maintenance on the process already, right, and making cyber special maybe is probably the wrong way to do it. Just talk about how it builds into the system. And then, yes, I think that point about causality and getting that root cause analysis quickly is absolutely critical. Del, how about you?

Del Rodillas;Palo Alto Networks;Director of OT Industry Solutions

attendee
#8

Yes. I kind of look at this in a couple of buckets. One is the usefulness when you identify just what you have and use that information. The other one is the additional context that you get when you think about network engineering, optimization and troubleshooting. So you'd have tools today that can tell you, "Okay, what kind of traffic is on the network." But when you are able to correlate that to what device is actually on the ensuing communications, what's causing the chattiness, what's causing this type of abnormality, that's really powerful. So you could use that in different phases of the life cycle of the plant when you're validating the initial deployment. So you can validate, "Hey, this is what I expect to see and this is what I'm seeing or not." So you could actually adjust the way you're deploying your new system if need be. The other scenario would be where you're troubleshooting some kind of issue. We've seen cases where you may have had some kind of weird outage in the client environment, and you're able to identify which device is kind of misbehaving. You might start seeing some kind of persistent or periodic warm restart on a PLC. And then you can say, "Oh, somebody forgot to remove this bit of code and the lateral logic that's causing that to happen." So you can identify things like that when you're able to correlate the network traffic with actual device much faster. We've heard of cases where people installed from a print servers on HMIs and that caused some network storm. So you're able to see the storm, you're able to see it's tied to the traffic going to the HMI itself. That'll help you in terms of improving the availability of the network. In the case of the PLC, that's more about some kind of actual outage. So it's really about making sure that the availability and potentially, safety concerns are addressed. So I think that's pretty important. Now it could be even as simple as, "Hey, I lost track of this asset." We have health care customers to -- sometimes they have these roaming insulin pumps and whatnot. Like where the heck is this insulin pump, which is on a cart somewhere. So you can say, "Oh, it's connected to this access point on second floor." So you can much easily find these assets that are potentially nowhere to be found. From a more simplistic standpoint, in terms of what -- getting inventory, right? So Marc mentioned asset management linking it up to your CMDB or connecting it to things like that automate ServiceNow or even a SOAR product. But more out there, use cases, we've actually heard our users talk about is financial analysis. They want to get inventory on the assets for depreciation on the balance sheet, right? They may be usable for future planning in terms of what assets potentially don't have enough hardware resources to support an expansion. And the other thing that's kind of rising in importance is supply chain is -- it's not necessarily cyber. But do I have -- if somebody asked you the question, do we have any devices in our network from this blacklisted supplier? It's going to help you answer these kind of things that management is asking about. A little bit more out there, but people sometimes say compliance is not cybersecurity. So compliance, meeting compliance, cybersecurity insurance, this might be able to help you with reducing cost of insurance. So a lot of other things, but it's around just knowing what you got and optimizing the availability and safety of your environment.

Mark Bristow;SANS Institute;Certified SANS Instructor

attendee
#9

Yes. Thanks, Del. I think that those are a couple of really great points. I just kind of wrote a couple of things down here. I think the first thing that I took away from that was that yes, how can you secure what you don't know you have? You can't do anomaly detection unless you know what normal is, right? And that -- I think that's dead on. A lot of different business impacts in the ways that we can do that. And one, I think, then I'm going to highlight that you kind of touched on the end there was the depreciation factor, right? That's something that the business understands on how we can leverage that, how we can make that in our planning. Again, mind you, any time you can really interact with the CFO on something that benefits security is -- in a positive way, it's going to be something that's worth doing. The last one that I want to just kind of highlight, too, is that compliance angle. Yes, compliance is not security, but compliance is business risk, right? I mean compliance is something that we have to do, and so there's business risk there. And I think that's another avenue, especially, as you mentioned, insurance, is potentially a way where we can find ways to articulate the business, how we're supporting other efforts with this asset identification. So really, really great points there. I appreciate that, though. So moving on to kind of the next question, right? And this has been a hot topic in this industry for a long time. We've come a long way in the technologies in the marketplace that's available to support asset identification in an active way. Running NMAP against your control system was an absolutely crazy proposition 10 years ago. It's still something I wouldn't directly recommend, especially because NMAP isn't really tuned to work with control systems, but you're going to have a much better experience these days. And really, things that our control systems have matured their technology. But more importantly, the community and the marketplace has a lot better technologies to actually support scanning actively of industrial control systems in less risky ways, right? So I think that, that's really a great way that we've moved forward and kind of our -- maturing our capabilities, I think, those parallels to IT, where back in the day with IT stuff, there wasn't a robust asset identification kind of platform. And now we have a lot of tools out there. So I think it's really a great change in the industry. So what, from your view, and Marty, I'm going to go to you first on this one. What from your view, Marty -- what really has changed in the marketplace here? And what drove that change? How did we get to a place where it's not crazy anymore to run active scanning in your environment?

Marty Edwards;Tenable;VP of Operational Technology Security

attendee
#10

Yes. Well, it's -- as you know, I've been one of the drivers and people behind some of that change. But you're exactly right, taking a tool like NMAP or even our own Nessus tool and just pointing it at random control system assets and scanning every available port and every available protocol can really overwhelm the limited communication stacks that exist in some of these ICS and OT products, right? And there's all kinds of horror stories from a decade ago of robot arms moving around by themselves because they were pinged or because they had some sort of scan. And so I actually would argue a little bit about even using the terminology to scan or not to scan. I don't think you should scan per se, your ICS environment. I think that you need to gain a certain level of baseline information about what kind of controllers and what manufacturers and what protocols do you have in your environment, and most contemporary OT security systems can do that through passive listening. But then, really, where the needle has moved is that there now exists the technology to communicate with the OT devices in their native language, and I don't consider that scanning. So if you have Rockwell, Siemens, et cetera, controllers on your network, we basically determine, "Oh, well, we hear Rockwell SIP protocol." So we will go out then and actively query or ask in the appropriate protocol, "Hey, we noticed that you're using this protocol, what type of controller are you? What's your patch level?" And basically elicit a conversation with the controller. And that's a very reliable and efficient and safe method to get this type of information. The vendors themselves have been configuring and maintaining and diagnosing their controllers using their own protocols for decades, right? And they've designed these protocols to be very efficient and very safe. So you now see the OT security vendors. And at Tenable, we believe we were the pioneer in this technology. But basically the mimicking or leveraging the exact same protocols to talk to those controllers, that gives us much better granularity of asset information. So it's not just the identification part, but we can actually drill down and baseline the actual running config in the device, which then gets you into that whole cyber maintenance type of conversation, right? So I really think that this technology has evolved. I had an interesting conversation with Dale Peterson about this. And if you went back 15 years ago, people would say, "Oh, you can't run antivirus on an HMI. It just won't work." And it was just not used. Well, now everybody has some sort of endpoint protection on their modern HMI, right? I mean the vendors have strategic alliances with the endpoint protection vendors. So I think we're going to go the same way with this active querying type technology passive. We'll still have its uses for network analysis and network traffic and everything. And -- but I think when you want to really get in-depth information from the endpoint, you're going to have to -- in the controller level 0, 1, 2, you're going to have to use the indigenous OT protocol.

Mark Bristow;SANS Institute;Certified SANS Instructor

attendee
#11

Yes. Marty, thanks. And I think that you made a couple of good points. And I'll take and admit the feedback that perhaps I was inartful in my attempt to be accessible within to scan or not to scan. Because, yes, the nuance there is incredibly valid, right? And it's not really scanning. Scanning has an implication that we're just kind of spamming out to the universe and not really in a controlled way. And yes, and I think that your kind of perspective on how the active querying tools, or whatever you want to call them, really have matured. And I think, to me, a big differentiator has been the leveraging the actual industrial control systems protocols themselves and interrogating them in the language they expect. Because a lot of the horror stories boil down to, well, you did something that the controller was never really expected to do and so -- and then it just fell over. But the control protocols are generally very robust. So I think that's an important point about how things have kind of moved on. And I think that your point, too, about how we -- this is valuable beyond asset identification is absolutely spot on. Obviously, the paper was focused on that, but there are a lot of other values that we can drive there. And the market really -- your analogy to AV, I think, is also spot on that, that was also something that was crazy at one point. And in reality, we've accepted that. And as the vendor community and the provider market space moves on, I think that's a really great point about how it's really been maturing. So appreciate that. Del, how about you? What's your perspective?

Del Rodillas;Palo Alto Networks;Director of OT Industry Solutions

attendee
#12

Yes. I think I have -- I don't know if it's different or opposite view. But from my standpoint, and I'll answer the question to scan or not to scan, its -- we're not very focused on active scanning in our technology. So that's not really an area that I have insight into. But I can focus on what my opinion is on the scanning. So it's not a black or white answer, in my opinion, on whether to scan or not scan. So I think the decision really has to be some kind of risk-based decision where -- and focusing on what your tolerance is as an organization. You need to consider different factors, right, well, like what is the likelihood of the assets itself to crash and the age of the asset, greenfield, brownfield, hybrid, how well maintained is it, the kind of assets you have, what kind of resources from a computer memory and the load on the asset, that definitely impacts the capability. The time frame, when are you doing this? Are you doing this during the production or in the maintenance window? Certainly that certain times are better to do this type of probing or scanning. And you may have modern systems, but what are the adjacencies? Do you have, on the same network, which could be a flat network, systems that could be impacted by a scan? So how isolated are they from the other assets? Very important things to consider. The most importantly, probably, what is the risk or the impact if something bad were to happen, monetary, environmental, reputation, worst case, loss of life, right? So I used to work as an engineer in a semiconductor environment where we work with dangerous chemicals like HF, hydrofluoric acid, which could really cause some serious situations for health and human safety, right? So I'm a little bit more conservative based on my prior experience and just kind of the approach, we believe so. There are definitely techniques that could mitigate that, as Marty pointed out. But from my personal standpoint, we would not -- we would consider the risk and make decisions based on that. I don't think we would ever prescribe or advocate scannings in safety critical environments I want to make sure that at the end of the day, everyone goes back home safe to their families. And we do believe that there are certain advancements in the passive approach where it's being more precise, looking at different -- 1,000 parameters under the network to get high confidence determination using things like machine learning. So -- and the other approach that we've seen applied is trying to make use of the intelligence from the crowd-sourced device learnings to make it ultra-precise. So net-net, if you're going to do it, again, consider the risks, be there to support the team, right? Don't just bolt after the install. We've seen cases where issues don't arise until a few days later because of a cascading effect. So if you're going to do this, you better put some skin in the game and be around to support the team over a period of days when you do that.

Mark Bristow;SANS Institute;Certified SANS Instructor

attendee
#13

Yes. Thanks, Del. I think you're spot on there with the risk management. I think with all things, the right answer to all questions tends to be, "it depends." And yes, your -- I was just kind of taking notes as you were saying that. I wrote down the same thing that you ultimately mentioned, which was evaluating the risk and -- versus the reward, especially like going after a safety system, for example, and doing active scanning, considering how small those systems are generally, it's probably not worth it because the consequence is so high if -- or potentially so high. If something does go wrong, even if you think that it's -- and you've tested it and it's low probability, the consequence is still really high, right? And that's where that risk model equation comes in. And I also agree with you that the passive technologies have also really upped their game as well as the active technologies over the years. I mean when I kind of started in this field a number of years ago, there wasn't really much of a marketplace of control system-specific technologies on any topic. And I think that it's also true that, that's evolved. Although to me, I do think there is a place for scanning, especially where there is some technologies that like lie dormant in a control process or not very noisy on the wire or those types of things. From an asset identification comprehensive perspective, really, I think the combination of a variety of techniques is needed. But to your point, the passive stuff has gotten a lot better than it used to be and it can sometimes interpret that as well as leveraging the community to understand. So I mean those are some really kind of good points as well. Marc, what are your thoughts on this topic?

Marc Blackmer;Cisco;Product Manager for IoT Security

executive
#14

Yes. I guess I'm going to play the part of Switzerland on this one because I'm sitting here listening to Marty going, "Yes. Yes, I agree." And I'm listening to Del, going, "Yes, I agree with that, too." I think, again, I guess, to the point of scan, even within our technology, you get just a little peek behind the curtain, we were originally going to call it active scanning or engineering, so we had active scanning project and I was like, "No, no, no. Don't call it that. We're going to call it Discovery." Because I think there's still that -- the sensitivity of scanning per se, right? It's the same thing, but it's just kind of how you want to label it. But I do think it shows the maturity. Well, actually, I don't want to say it that way. I think it shows the growth of how things have come along in this space when it comes to the cybersecurity stuff. We talk about putting endpoint protection on HMI and I think it's taken, really, security vendors speaking as one to understand what somebody really needs on the operations side; that you can't just slap in, like you said, NMAP and go nuts. It just doesn't work that way. And I would hear horror stories from customers or the ops folks could go to lunch and the IT guys would fire up the NMAP while they're away, and they take part of the system down. So I'd like to think that we're advancing beyond that. There's enough understanding that security is obviously needed. Some of the techniques are needed, or the concepts, but they'd have to be applied in a way that's appropriate in the control space. And I think, Del, you bring up a really good point about the safety systems. And I think, again, us as vendors or we as vendors, it's really important to give the customer that choice. You may have an area where you can go out and probe a device, of course, using native protocols, but the customer should have the choice of what to do because this is, for all the reasons that Del laid out, could be very, very, very dangerous. I think -- all in all, I think it makes sense. I think, again, it's shades of gray because it's got to be done in the right way and in a way that helps the situation, not interject more problems. But I think if you would ask me a couple of years ago what I thought about it, I would have said no way. But, too, my thinking over the years has changed as long as it's done appropriately. And I see that, that's where the market's going, thankfully, so that I'm much more of a proponent on it now with those caveats.

Marty Edwards;Tenable;VP of Operational Technology Security

attendee
#15

Mark Bristow, I'd like to just interject a final comment here. I think another key benefit of this type of technology, where you're doing this active discovery, active querying, whatever you want to talk about it, is there tends to exist a certain complexity in passively instrumenting a system to get access to all the data. You've got to put sensors or SPAN ports or stuff all over. And we found that if you'll have a routable -- if you have a path to route to the device, you can elicit that conversation using the native protocol and we've got implementations or installations where one, basically, engine sitting in the right place can go out and touch dozens of networks that you'd have to have passive sensors or aggregation points to capture the traffic. So I think there's a lot of growth and maturity that's going to happen here, but I do really see it as the way to the future.

Mark Bristow;SANS Institute;Certified SANS Instructor

attendee
#16

Yes. Thanks, Marc and Marty, for those comments. So I think I really need to apologize for using the S-word in this conversation because I think it can pull you all off by using that reference and...

Marc Blackmer;Cisco;Product Manager for IoT Security

executive
#17

It's 4-letter -- it's a 4-letter S-word.

Mark Bristow;SANS Institute;Certified SANS Instructor

attendee
#18

It's a 4-letter S-word. It's fair, totally fair. But -- so I'm going to turn that into a positive here. And I think it's great that we're having this kind of conversation about why lexicon matters. And Marc, you hit on it. I think the way you started off about actually having that dialogue with operations and understanding their needs, but part of that is effective communication, which happens in both directions, right? And lexicon is a big problem. In my career, going between a power plant and a water plant, it's like they speak 2 different languages. They might run the same vendor, but they have different words for everything, right? And so I think that, that's important to speak in a way that -- where you can be understood and where you understand and then be sensitive to keywords, and maybe I'll start using discovery instead of scan.

Del Rodillas;Palo Alto Networks;Director of OT Industry Solutions

attendee
#19

So Mark, if I can just -- so I told you I started in IT and then I was on the vendor side and moved over focusing on OT when I started at Sourcefire. And early, early on, I was on the call with a customer and just on the phone, actually, to give you an idea how a while ago it was, but I made the comment about, "Oh, we have a private cloud option." And as soon as I said, cloud, like just -- I couldn't get a word in for the next 5 minutes. And I just remember the customer at the end said, "Son, never say that word again." But we've progressed. Now you can actually say cloud and you probably won't get anything from it. So don't worry, scan, it may come around.

Marty Edwards;Tenable;VP of Operational Technology Security

attendee
#20

Yes. And you know what, we're going to have a whole other webcast just on OT cloud, probably in the future.

Mark Bristow;SANS Institute;Certified SANS Instructor

attendee
#21

I knew it. I will recommend that one because I definitely have thoughts on that. I did want to do a quick reply, Marty, to the one, I think, you said about the challenges in instrumenting in environment for some of these -- for passive technologies, which I think is a valid one. And I think your point was spot on, but I want to provide a counter-narrative example as well. Because earlier in my career, I was doing some -- I was doing SIP auditing in the electric power industry. And I was working with a customer who was in the process of -- had a whole bunch of nonroutable communications with their field devices, over substations, so a lot of dial-up and that kind of stuff. And they were actively ripping out -- well, they weren't ripping it out, but they had laid fiber between all of their substations to increase the reliability of their system. And they were in the process of turning all that fiber off because they were trying to get around the nonroutable SIP exception, which didn't actually work, but that's not relevant to this conversation. The point that I want to make is that sometimes we have some unintended consequences in enabling that access for that visibility, for the passive monitoring to actually create risky pathways that you otherwise didn't have because that was in serial com before. And now we have fiber to that area, and so now we've created potentially a risk vector. So I guess it falls back down on the Del's point of it all depends, and it's a risk tolerance discussion. Because at the end of the day, there's negative consequences to some of the security things we do and -- or there can be. And we need to mitigate the risk we introduce just as much as we mitigate the risks that we're trying to do from bad actors, right?

Del Rodillas;Palo Alto Networks;Director of OT Industry Solutions

attendee
#22

So yes, totally valid point. And again, so really forward leaning, the way I think that we'll end up solving that is with integration, right? So there's no reason for those pathways to be open, 100% of the time. So our security tools should be able to talk to the next-generation firewall devices or the perimeter devices and be able to open that channel just when we need it and then tear it back down. And I see us going that way as an industry.

Mark Bristow;SANS Institute;Certified SANS Instructor

attendee
#23

Yes. And I think you all made this point to some extent. And then I'll just pile on that, yes, I think it's the integration of multiple names, multiple techniques and then using the right one where appropriate based on the risk management decisions and then really integrating those types of technologies with our defensive measures as well as bringing it back to create a comprehensive picture, I think that is -- the best path is probably a little of each -- kind of take investment brief from all the different types of technologies out there and having an integrated approach. I think that integration is where we'll get a lot of dividends. And I think that the IT community has kind of gone through some of this evolution already. And I think the OT community is waking up to some of those needs. So good points kind of across, everybody. So we want to talk about this, too. This is one that I think comes up a whole lot is that, is scoping, right? When you're trying to get this going and perhaps you've convinced your management to buy a tool to help you do this or to start a project to do asset identification. And then you step back and you look at that plant and you go, "Man, where do I start?" The plant's huge. I have all these assets." And it's just this like overwhelming feeling of dread that, "How am I going to accomplish this task," right? And it's really a challenging thing because they are not really -- at the end of the day, you want to get a comprehensive answer. But if you try and chew the entire elephant at once, you're probably going to fail. And this is, I think, one of the areas where a lot of people struggle is, "Okay, well, what scope is the right scope? What's ultimately in scope? How do I get started?" We talked a little bit about that in the paper about maybe even ticking something that's not even really your process control system to refine your capability. The building they track, right? That's kind of a control system. How do you scope it, right? And how do you avoid what I see as one of the biggest challenges, which is going down the rabbit hole and just not being able to get yourself back out and kind of losing the purpose in the detail? And I think that, that's really at risk in immature programs to kind of have that challenge. So Del, I'll go to you first. What are some of the strategies that you think can be effectively leveraged in scoping, not only your initial activity, but then making sure that you can expand that, taking into account all the different data and things that you can bring to bear? How do you approach this problem, Del?

Del Rodillas;Palo Alto Networks;Director of OT Industry Solutions

attendee
#24

Yes. I mean, like with a lot of things, you begin with the end in mind and identify what is your objective. Are you trying to just have some kind of asset inventorying? Or are you trying to assess risk or want to go to the point where you're stopping threats that you may find? What kind of assets are you protecting? Is it just the old stuff? The new stuff? Or a mix? Ultimately, you want to have more of a monitoring-only stance or enforcement that there's some integration considerations when you look at that. And the other thing is a lot of these solutions that are starting to address both IT and OT and IoT, right? Are you -- is that part of the scope that you need to get to where you have a unified approach to just call it device security across the entire enterprise? And from there, I think it's important to look at what asset environments are appropriate with that goal in mind. And I think that will help you really with defining what is the scope and trying -- there's going to be some changes as you kind of progress, but minimize that scope creep and try to stick to this goal as close as possible. I don't -- just because you have a goal, it doesn't mean you're going to get the buy-in. You're going to need to get that support with the OT side of the house. So I explained the benefits of the technology. We talked about some of those noncyber type of benefits, but that plus the cyber to get buy-in before you can actually even access these assets environment. So in terms of, let's say, you have a plan and you needed to kind of start, you're not going to probably just start dropping sensors or monitoring components across the entire environment. You're going to want to start small, right? So if possible, find like maybe a cell or a line. You mentioned BMS or BAS systems, building automation systems, right? That could be a good, small bite-size piece. If possible, it's something that you could walk and visually confirm the components that are also there to compare with what you have. Again, just going back to how I answered the second question, avoid safety critical. It is good that you're not going to get buy-in from the OT guys if you start there. And if possible, leverage existing tools, there's many ways to get this type of technology. And there, our approach is really to bring it -- make it available as a service on the next-generation firewall. So if you already have a firewall that DMZ, between IT and OT, that might be a way you could easily tap that access switch, where you have the PLCs and HMIs connected to and get visibility to layer 2, layer 3 -- level 2, level 3, level 1 Purdue, right? So maybe we'd use existing packet brokers that are already getting these kind of feeds and feedback to whatever sensor device is going to -- that ingest that and make use of it. So I would say that's kind of some of the starting point considerations you need to think about before you start going big.

Mark Bristow;SANS Institute;Certified SANS Instructor

attendee
#25

Yes. No, I think that's a great point about you likely already have some telemetry available to you, whether or not you are leveraging it or not, it may already be in your systems. And so that could be a great place to start is what -- what data fees do I already have to support this effort? And as you kind of scope it and start small, I think that, that's -- I think it's funny, just kind of overarching. A lot of the things that we're talking about that are across all these questions that have been challenges really are human element things, right? Staying focused, stay on task, keep your objective. Your methods may change, but your goals should stay the same. I think that, that's -- that rings very true to me in just that the longer I've been in this field, the more I feel that this is not a technology problem, it's people problem at the end of the day. And that's where we're really going to make the headway. So, yes. Some great comments, Del. I think you're on about just trying to leverage what you got and then start adding in capabilities where you have gaps. I think that's a good perspective. What about you, Marc? How do you recommend people approach this problem?

Marc Blackmer;Cisco;Product Manager for IoT Security

executive
#26

Yes. I think that's funny you used the, "eating the elephant metaphor," I guess. And the first time I actually heard that, I have it in my notes, "eating the elephant." Actually, I had written that down before you said that.

Mark Bristow;SANS Institute;Certified SANS Instructor

attendee
#27

Great minds with the similar names, Marc.

Marc Blackmer;Cisco;Product Manager for IoT Security

executive
#28

Exactly. Exactly. But when Del mentioned health care, I start -- I don't know if you can see me starting to get a tick, but I was in IT at a hospital system for 7 months to the day, which I would say is 6 months too long. But what it happened, we finally get to the point -- it's only understaffed, under budget, the whole nine yards. And next, we're going to tackle HIPAA across the entire health care system. And my response was a 2-line resignation letter. Just like, "That's it. I'm done. I'm out. I'm out." And my management at this time looks at me and he goes, "How do you eat an elephant?" Like, "Wow, this guy is just -- what?" I've never heard the expression before. So we started with the elephant one bite at a time. But, yes, I think that's the thing I've seen it. It doesn't matter in what scenario or what technology, whatever, starting can be overwhelming. And I think, exactly to Del's point, you scope it and you start with something that's manageable. I do like the idea of starting with just like pick some inconsequential area of the business and look at that. One of the things that I would advise customers a lot of times, too, was to look at their business continuity plan, assuming they have one because if you do have that -- and I spent many a night myself in Sterling Forest, if you're familiar with that, 3 in the morning going, "What do you mean the tapes won't load?" You find out what you need and what's dependent on each other. And it's going to be -- it's never going to be perfect, but I think going in there, you can iterate and refine. But that's the big thing. If you have that business continuity plan, somebody's already done the work. Maybe you, part of the team, have found what's critical. Maybe start with that and expand outward. But I think the critical part is just to find a place to start and then you can get the ball rolling. And I'm just seeing it with customers. And I'll just say it one last time, actually doing a rollout when I was in IT, I mean, we went hog wild system monitoring. And man, we didn't blow up, the systems themselves started to blow up. But we were so buried in data. And I think that's the other side of it, too. There's the -- how do you roll it out? But what do you do if you roll out on a massive scale and next thing you know you can't figure out what's important. So we had to take a step back and say, "You know what? E-mail systems are important. Let's start with those." And then once we have an idea of what we like then, we'd go to our database system. So anyways, yes. I think the scope -- try to go with the business continuity plan, if at all possible, but also understand what you want to do with the information when it comes back. And just -- it's going to be an ongoing process. It's never going to end, and I think that's important to recognize as well.

Mark Bristow;SANS Institute;Certified SANS Instructor

attendee
#29

Yes. And I think these are all really great points. I think that using -- your example of the continuity plan and your disaster management plan, I think, is a really good one because a lot of times, well, we are not generally the first person to ask the question. And maybe we're asking a subset of the question that is a little nuanced. But ultimately, we're starting with what's actually important? Well, that question is one that has -- hopefully, has been asked by someone already, right? And your safety plan can be another source of that information, like what is actually critical, your continuity plan, et cetera. I know -- a number of years ago, I was talking to some oil and gas companies, and they're like, "Oh, yes. We got backups. It's all good." And I was like, "Well, when was the last time you tested it?" And like, they actually did and we found out that the tapes were in the back of Bob's truck, and Bob's left the company 2 years ago. He still had the tapes though. So your co-dependencies can be interesting, right? But that's the thing. And I think you actually hit an important point, too, that maybe it's a little bit of a counterpoint to Del's point, which -- and again, I feel like Switzerland. You're both right in certain ways. The risk I see about bringing on data sources that already exist too early in the process is that if your process is not mature enough to bring in all the data coming off your firewalls and your packet brokers and stuff, that can actually ultimately negatively impact your ability to get going because you're just not really ready for that, right? And I think that that's where -- and you both hit this point that scoping and starting and something that's manageable is so important because you could easily go off the deep end on all of these things and then ultimately not make the progress that you could have made with the same input energy. So -- how about you, Marty? Sorry, Marc, do you have a retort there?

Marc Blackmer;Cisco;Product Manager for IoT Security

executive
#30

Not a retort, but I think just look at it because we do talk about the start and like, what are you going to do when you get it? And I was just going to use an analogy. I mean I used to work in the SIM space for a long time. So same thing and we can do anything with a SIM. Customers would come and say, "Well, what does this thing do? My life was spent doing proofs of concept." And my response was, "Well, you don't walk into Home Depots or Lowe's and go, what can I do with all this stuff? What you do is you go, "I'm going to build a birdhouse." All right. These are the things that you want. So I just thinking of that analogy of you can do almost anything with it, what is it you want to do. That's all.

Mark Bristow;SANS Institute;Certified SANS Instructor

attendee
#31

I might steal that, Marc. That's a good analogy.

Marc Blackmer;Cisco;Product Manager for IoT Security

executive
#32

There you go. There you go.

Mark Bristow;SANS Institute;Certified SANS Instructor

attendee
#33

Good Point. How about you, Marty? How do you help your customers in scoping and getting their systems bootstrapped?

Marty Edwards;Tenable;VP of Operational Technology Security

attendee
#34

Yes. It definitely is a good analogy. I might steal it, too. So I totally agree with Del and Marc that when you're entering into a new proof of value, proof of concept, you need to start small. I think one thing that is worthy of being mentioned is we recommend trying to find as diverse of an environment as possible for those so that you can gain confidence that you can actually see and communicate and interpret all of the different devices, right? So don't go into a homogeneous environment with just one vendor. Go -- try to pick the environment that has the most diversity in vendors because that will really weed out where you have some challenges. The other topic, I think, that hasn't really been raised here that is really, really relevant is -- and it's kind of a buzzword, but the whole IT-OT convergence issue, right? So a lot of our customers, if you look at our core business, is vulnerability management in the enterprise side. And so I think you have to prove out in these types of solutions that there's benefit for the OT engineers and there's also benefit for the IT security analysts. So on the OT side, if we can give them troubleshooting tools to troubleshoot changes in their baseline configurations on the device or misbehaving devices in the OT space and provide that to them in a view that they're comfortable with, right? So they see a PLC chassis, they see cards in a backplane, they see it in a view that they're comfortable with, that gives that group of engineers some comfort. But even though it's mainly a security product, right, but it gives them comfort that we're talking their language. On the flip side of that, when all this data rolls up into a vulnerability management platform across the enterprise, it's the exact same data, but now it's in list form and it's mapped to specific CVEs and it's prioritized with regards to where it fits within the enterprise's vulnerability management prioritization scheme, right? So I think it's important to have those conversations up-front with the customer, to understand who owns the project, right? Is this an IT-driven project? Or is this an OT-driven project? And make sure that all of the players see that value. So that might be a little bit off topic for scope, but I do think it's really relevant in making sure that these types of projects ultimately succeed because either side can say no, right? Even though it's a project driven by one or the other, they both have to -- most of the time, they both have to have a consensus that, yes, this is going to move forward.

Mark Bristow;SANS Institute;Certified SANS Instructor

attendee
#35

Yes, Marty, I think that's -- I think you made 2 important points there. One, kind of on the environment, and we don't -- I have never seen a complete vendor homogeneous control system environment. I've seen a couple of places get close, like in the 90 percentile range. But there's always that one legacy piece of kit that we couldn't replace. There's always an asterisk around that. And you can't have an effective and comprehensive program if you're only being capable of dealing with one vendor's equipment, right? And so that's a really good point about scoping is that your program will have to work across different assets and different types of assets and that's, I think, important. And again, kind of continuing on the human aspects and the communications aspects of this problem that, I think you're right in literally how you display the information to the customer in a way that they can consume it effectively and make them comfortable is a really important point. If you just show in somebody's spreadsheet, their eyes kind of glaze over. If you throw a whole lot of CPEs at them and -- control engineers are going to tune out way before you get to the E in CVE. But if you show them, "Oh, well, here's your wire and piping diagram, and this is where your assets. And yes, you gave us this diagram, and we couldn't find these things, but we found this thing. Oh, and that thing you didn't know about over here, you forgot to include." It's about communicating to them in ways that they can consume your information. And that's really important to even -- especially when it comes to building the trust to take -- undertake something like this where maybe there's some just implicit bias resistance to the concept in general, right? And so just having that appropriate communications pathway, I think, is a key element. Again, kind of boiling down to the human aspect of this challenge as opposed to the technical ones. Because the technical ones, while they're not all solved, we're making a lot of progress as we've discussed, right? There's a lot of progress happening. But the human challenge is, I think, one that's going to be with us enduring, right, for quite some time.

Marc Blackmer;Cisco;Product Manager for IoT Security

executive
#36

Actually, I think, to Marty's point -- sorry, I was going to say something quick. We look at it now, too, and I'm curious to know since I have my colleagues here, we don't get to see each other on the road anymore. But that's one of the things that we're seeing, too. And I don't know because, of course, we're very network-y here at Cisco. But it's like now, it's a lot of times, it's 3 different stakeholders. So it's going to be InfoSec. It's going to be NetOPs and it's going to be operations. And so yes, I think it's been -- that's another change I've seen with all of our products here and the others in the space is we have to be relevant for all of them. So you talk about -- you've got to have value or OT, you're going to sleep before you get to the E in CVE. Yes, not just the discussions that you have with the stakeholders because they tend to be more, but it's incumbent upon us to all provide value for each of those stakeholders. And I think that's something interesting. And I'm wondering -- sorry, I don't mean to like take away. I'm just -- if you guys are seeing the same kind of shift in -- when you talk to customers, are you seeing the same thing?

Marty Edwards;Tenable;VP of Operational Technology Security

attendee
#37

Yes. Absolutely. That's more or less why I brought it up. And being an enterprise vulnerability management company, first and foremost, a lot of our projects are driven from the IT InfoSec side of the house. It's the Director of Vulnerability Management. And -- but the OT person in the plant can absolutely stop or veto the project. And so we need to learn to sell and communicate to those people. And I think we've got a good path forward there. And obviously, infrastructure is the same, right? If you've got to put these sensors and all these devices somewhere, somebody is going to have to install it all. And if you have too laborious of a process, that can be a deal breaker, too. So yes, definitely, it's becoming -- you have to know all the right players.

Marc Blackmer;Cisco;Product Manager for IoT Security

executive
#38

Yes. Sorry, Mark, just to take an advantage of the opportunity.

Mark Bristow;SANS Institute;Certified SANS Instructor

attendee
#39

Yes. No, and I agree and we'll go to some Q&A here from the audience in the last couple of minutes. [Operator Instructions] But just to address that, Marc, I think that, that's spot on that. And really, one of my motivations for writing this paper was really that we need to be communicating the value to a variety of different stakeholders. And if we don't do that, we're going to get the hard no from the operations team or we're not going to get the money we need from the business or -- and so -- and really, this type -- asset identification brings a lot of value that it's fundamental to a variety of streams in the enterprise. And it just -- it's about how we communicate that to the right stakeholders in words they understand it and with pictures they get. I think it's the thing that I see as being something that is a challenge, that -- where challenge becomes -- with this cybersecurity story and like that's not enough, right? And we got to be more articulate about why this is important and, more importantly, how they benefit from a robust asset identification and asset management program. Look, "Why is this going to make your job easier," is something that we need to really do. So I'm glad that you guys are experiencing similar kind of feelings on that. Just kind of speaking of that, I think that I've got a relevant question from the audience here coming from John, that the asset management requirements, for example, this is IEC 62443, when you have some of those requirements in these regulatory standards, that can be one way to articulate that kind of value, but it can also -- you have contradicting requirements. You can have different requirements from different standards, different outputs required for different reports, et cetera. So this question is, how do you integrate those -- I'm trying to paraphrase it, how do you integrate those different sets of requirements for different types of standards in your asset management requirement so that you can eventually drive that value to the business. Yes, Marty?

Marty Edwards;Tenable;VP of Operational Technology Security

attendee
#40

I can take a shot at that. We're definitely looking at those. And I believe that the way that we should approach it is you've got this data lake of all of the asset identification information, all of the different details, configurations, patch levels, et cetera. So really, it's a reporting or dashboarding challenge, right? So you just give the view into that data lake that's relevant for that specific requirement or standards. The challenge, of course -- and Mark, with my role at DHS, I dealt with a lot of international governments. I had hoped that we were coming together for globalization of these through things like ISA/IEC 62443, but now I see a lot of federalism taking back over in the standards community. And so my customers in EMEA have a whole different subset that they're looking at versus my customers in APAC. And so we need to learn how to provide them the data in the right context and in the right way. This is a very similar to the conversation about IT and OT people. The IT people want lists of stuff and green and red boxes beside CVE numbers. And the engineers, they want to see the backplane and they want to see what is in that chassis. And so just presenting the data that we have in a fashion that's relevant for the framework or regulation.

Del Rodillas;Palo Alto Networks;Director of OT Industry Solutions

attendee
#41

Yes. I'll add to that. I think one of the things we've kind of discovered as we compared a lot of the standards, there's a lot of commonality. It might be a different requirement number, but this special publications, IEC 62443's cybersecurity framework, there's a lot of commonality. So if you're kind of subject to multiple of these, it's worth it to go through this exercise of trying to align which ones are exactly the same as the others. And then to Marty's point, the tools that you have should be able to create these reports in the format that easily allows you to efficiently report back on these, whether it's how are you providing the artifacts that prove that you're implementing what you're supposed to or showing that your configurations are aligned with what you -- the controls you're supposed to do. So it's about that early exercise to just kind of map things out and then execute.

Marty Edwards;Tenable;VP of Operational Technology Security

attendee
#42

Yes. No, I totally agree that mapping. I think the mapping exercise and seeing what's common across these different frameworks, that's really good for day-to-day management, how are we doing across the board. But when the auditors come in, you need to push print on the report that says, click, click, click, we've complied, right?

Mark Bristow;SANS Institute;Certified SANS Instructor

attendee
#43

Yes. I think that's a great point, and not here represent the day job. I don't think that we've -- but the international standards bodies, I don't think have been driven enough even though they're asking for the same thing. If they're asking in just a different enough way, maybe some not-built-here syndrome. But just kind of checking the clock, I want to thank Marc, Marty and Del for joining me today to talk about this. I think a really great topic, a really great discussion. Thanks for our sponsors, Cisco, Palo Alto and Tenable for sponsoring this webcast. I hope -- for those of you in the audience, I hope you learned something, a new strategy that you can take on today and implement. And really, thank you very much for taking the time to -- out of your busy schedule to join us, and thanks, John, for joining me in this panel. And maybe when COVID ends, we'll -- we can -- oh, we can have this conversation at an event sometime.

Marc Blackmer;Cisco;Product Manager for IoT Security

executive
#44

There you go. Thank you.

Marty Edwards;Tenable;VP of Operational Technology Security

attendee
#45

Thanks. It was a pleasure.

Del Rodillas;Palo Alto Networks;Director of OT Industry Solutions

attendee
#46

Take care.

Carol Auth;SANS Institute;Webcast Facilitator

attendee
#47

All right. Thank you so much, Mark, Marc, Marty and Del, for your great presentation. Thank you, Cisco, Palo Alto Networks and Tenable for sponsoring this webcast, which helps bring this content to the SANS community. To our audience, we greatly appreciate you listening in. For a schedule of all upcoming and archived SANS webcasts, including this one, please visit sans.org/webcast. Until next time, take care, and we hope to have be back again for the next SANS webcast.

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