Episode 133: Engineering Expertise: Core Skills for ICS/OT Cybersecurity with Marcus Sachs, Patrick Miller and Christian Harter

I'll go ahead and get started.

It...

For me, it was late '90s, uh, still in uniform, still in the Army, and we had...

This was before there was a cyber command.

We had a small group of us, a joint task force, that were trying to figure out how to protect the Defense Department's networks from, uh, foreign attackers.

And we got pretty good at the enterprise IT side, but there was always this little itch back there about, well, what about everything that's not enterprise IT? And, uh, most Army bases, military bases have infrastructure, much like cities and towns do.

And so we were, we were concerned about what the Russians, the Chinese, you know, whomever, what, what they might do to us.

So again, in those days it was SCADA, OT, ICS.

You know, those, those were yet to be, uh, terms that would evolve.

But a lot of interest in it.

And then, of course, post-9/11, wondering what the terrorists would do.

Could, could they terrorize us by cutting off power, by interrupting water supply? So my interest really got started about that time, late '90s, early 2000s, and has evolved from there.

Yeah.

I'll, I'll go next, I guess.

Um, in the late '80s.

Um, we, we, then the, the networks were fairly new, and, um, I was in telecom.

I was also going to college for microbiology, actually, not for other things.

Um, so yeah, if you wanna talk about lot, lots of organic chemistry, I can still do that, too.

Uh, but we, um, a small team of us were the lab TAs at the university, and we found that other universities were breaking into our systems and were causing problems, and would fork us off the entire network, and all the researchers couldn't get to their papers.

And, uh, so this is an early deck alpha platform, and uh, I learned t- to defend in college as a lab TA, so-

[laughs]

Yeah.

Excellent, and I was one of those painful guys in college that you were probably attempting to uh-

[laughs]

... to defend against.