29 November 2022

AFSecurity Seminar: How to Attack and Defend Wind Farms and How OSINT is Used to Penetrate Infrastructure Assets

TIME:  Tuesday 29 November 2022, 12:00h PLACE:  Auditorium Smalltalk, 1th floor, IFI, UiO, Ole Johan Dahls hus, Gaustadalleen 23b, Oslo. See map. Coffee and snaks served. AGENDA: 14:00 Invited talk TITLE: How to Attack and Defend Wind Farms   SPEAKER: Sujeet Shenoi, University of Tulsa, USA

• ABSTRACT:
  As modern society grows more reliant on wind energy, wind farm deployments will become increasingly attractive targets for malicious entities. The geographic scale of wind farms, remoteness of assets, flat logical control networks and insecure control protocols expose wind farms to a myriad of threats. This presentation describes the anatomy of a generic wind farm and the attack vectors that can be leveraged to target its information technology, industrial control system and physical assets. It discusses attack scenarios involving unauthorized wind turbine control, wind turbine damage, wind farm disruption and damage, and substation disruption and damage. Additionally, it highlights mitigation techniques that provide robust security coverage and reduce negative cyber and physical impacts. The attack surface, targets, scenarios and mitigation techniques presented are common across wind farm deployments. However, it is still possible to add details about the unique aspects of wind farm assets, configurations and operations in order to develop a holistic risk management program geared for a specific wind farm deployment.
  

15:15 Invited talk

• TITLE: 'How OSINT is Used to Penetrate Infrastructure Assets  
• SPEAKER: Sujeet Shenoi, University of Tulsa, USA
• ABSTRACT:
  OSINT (Open Source Intelligence) is the activity of using openly and publicly available information for doing reconnaissance about a person or an organization. OSINT is used by threat actors as part of the reconnaissance step which is the first step in the Cyber Kill Chain, to find out how targets can be attacked, and to be used as part of an attack. It is therefore obvious that organizations and individuals have an interest in limiting or reducing the amount of information that OSINT can produce about oneself. This talk presents how OSINT is typically used as a preparation for attacks against assets and also discusses how an organization can reduce the potential of OSINT against themselves, to mitigate threat scenarios and to reduce vulnerabilities.
  

15:45 Discussion

BIO:   Sujeet Shenoi is the F.P. Walter Professor of Computer Science and a Professor of Chemical Engineering at the University of Tulsa, Tulsa, Oklahoma. An active researcher with specialties in cyber security, cyber operations, critical infrastructure protection and digital forensics, Dr. Shenoi works on exciting “problems” ranging from helping solve homicides to penetrating telecommunications systems, oil and gas pipelines, wind farms and voting machines. He spearheads the University of Tulsa's elite Cyber Corps Program that trains “MacGyvers” for U.S. government agencies. For his innovative strategies integrating academics, research and service, Dr. Shenoi was named the 1998-1999 U.S. Professor of the Year by the Carnegie Foundation.

AFSecurity is organised by UiO Digital Security.