As 2024 comes to a close, it’s traditional to reflect on the and maybe catch up on bits of reading and events that we missed throughout the year because of our busy schedules. To this end, I recommend to you three of this year’s Waterfall webinars, each an overview of Waterfall or other authors’ reports that read faster when we’ve seen an overview, so each of us can skip faster to the material we find most potentially useful.

Over the past 12 months, it has been a pleasure and a privilege to co-host the Industrial Security Podcast. When I started the podcast 5-ish years ago, bluntly, I did not know if there was enough industrial security content in the world for more than a year or two of episodes. It turns out the OT security space is much broader and deeper than I knew, and I’ve both learned something in every episode and become aware of how much more that I don’t know that every one of my guests do know and give us a few insights based on that knowledge in every episode.

Choosing three from this year’s episodes was hard, but here are three that stood out for me. If you ask me for a theme for these episodes, I’d have to say all three provide insights into high-consequence attacks, risk blind spots, and of course defenses against these attacks. This is all consistent with the perspective of the Cyber-Informed Engineering initiative and with the themes I explore in my latest book, Engineering-Grade OT Security: A Manager’s Guide.

I hope you enjoy listening to these podcasts as much as I enjoyed the interviews and discussions. And stay tuned, we are working on many more guests and discussions in 2025!

Situational awareness (SA) is one of the most important facets when considering any form of security, and especially cybersecurity. Network Operation Centers (NOC) and Security Operation Centers (SOC) are keen to have a strong grasp of what is going on within their scope of responsibilities. This way, they can be proactive instead of reactive to threats, risks, and general operational incidents.  

Waterfall Central is a browser-based solution designed to enable personnel responsible for multiple Waterfall devices to easily monitor all their devices.  

As industries embrace the power of the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) and other cloud-based technologies to enhance operational efficiencies, a challenge has emerged in bridging the gap between the need for digitization and the importance of securing critical infrastructure systems. The conventional approach of directly connecting Industrial Control Systems (ICS) and Operational Technology (OT) to external networks poses significant cybersecurity risks. After extensive joint lab testing and data validation, Amazon Web Services (AWS) now recommends using Waterfall Unidirectional Gateways as the preferred solution for securely connecting industrial systems to the AWS cloud. 

I was asked to put a few words together about my favorite Industrial Security Podcast episodes of all time. I scanned the complete list at https://waterfall-security.com/podcast and came up with these five. The first four were episodes that contributed materially my thinking & the formation of sections and chapters in my latest “gold” book Engineering-Grade OT Security: A manager’s guide.

The fifth didn’t really fit the gold book, but I’m mulling the episode over for possible inclusion in my next book, if there is one. The gold book was all about risk in the context of individual organizations. For the future, I’m wondering if the world needs a bigger picture book of where OT cyber risk fits into the context of “all risks” that modern societies face, from nuclear war and EMPs to massive solar storms and global warming. I dunno for sure, please let me know what you think.