Stewart Baker is one of the preeminent lawyers on topics of cyber law with an impressive career in and out of government. Stewart also hosts the Cyberlaw podcast.

The Biden administration is contending that vendors should be held liable for security deficiencies in their products.

Assuming this is turned into law and/or executive orders, what does it mean? What can we learn from other liability law to inform us what would be required for a vendor to be held liable for a security issue? How would the judgment / damages be determined.

Dale's note: We talk about the SEC charges against SolarWinds in this interview.

Dale Peterson interviews Rob Lee on the S4 Main Stage. They cover a lot of ground and Rob is never shy about sharing his opinions and analysis.
They discuss:

• Rob’s first S4
• PIPEDREAM deployed v. employed distinction … and why 2 years later is it still the most dangerous ICS malware?
• Are we really more homogenous?
• What makes a group something that Rob/Dragos tracks as an ICS focused attacker?
• If the answer to intel is do the basics, do I need intel?
• What ICS specific data was VOLTZITE exfiltrating?
• What countries are targeting critical infrastructure? Is it realistic to expect any country to not target its adversaries CI?
• Threat actors focused on manufacturing
• How should an asset owner measure the effectiveness of their detection solution?

Chris Hughes and Nikki Robinson recently wrote the book Effective Vulnerability Management. Dale and Chris discuss the topic and book including:

• The definition and scope of vulnerabilities. It’s much more than coding errors that need patches.

• Are ICS protocols lacking authentication “vulnerabilities”

• The reality that most organizations have 100’s of thousands of unpatched vulnerabilities. Some statistics and will this change.

• Ways to prioritize what vulnerabilities you address.

• The SSVC decision tree approach that was introduced at S4 as Never, Next, Now

• Tooling … vulnerability management, software configuration, ticketing, remediation.

• And much more.

Links:

• Effective Vulnerability Management, https://www.amazon.com/Effective-Vulnerability-Management-Vulnerable-Ecosystem/dp/1394221207/

• Dale’s ICS-Patch Decision Tree, https://dale-peterson.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/ICS-Patch-0_1.pdf