News

8 November 2024: Some results from RICS research were presented at the Security Divas conference organised at Karlstad University.

23 October 2024: The results of the Inquiry on the required changes in laws and ordinances with respect to the European NIS2 implementation has been published in September 2024 and delivered as SOU 2024:64.

14 August 2024: The Cybersecurity conference hosted by the Civil contingencies agency (MSB) will be held on 14-15th October.

4 July 2024: Swedish National Security Strategy has been published.

18 June 2024: The international association of CIP professionals will be contributing to the EU CIPRE event during the CIP week, 11-14 November 2024, in Madrid.

12 June 2024: The EU agency ENISA is now authorised as a Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) Numbering Authority and can support coordinated vulnerability disclosure.

11 June 2024: Microsoft has confirmed a high-severity vulnerability applicable to all Windows versions that use a WiFi driver and can be subject to remote code execution.

30 May 2024: Lumen Technologies provided a more detailed account of what is known about the last October takeout of 600 000 routers belonging to an unnamed ISP provider.

17 Apr 2024: ENISA has released a report with a mapping between the Cyber Resilience Act (CRA) and existing standards in April 2024.

1 Apr 2024: The Nordic conference on IT security (Nordsec 2024) will be held in Karlstad in November this year.

27 Mar 2024: The Foresight cybersecurity threat landscape for 2030 has been updated by ENISA and includes some new items including the impact of natural/environmental disruptions on critical infrastructure.

21 mar 2024: Cybernode round tables in collaboration with Cybercampus Sweden on April 10 will include six topics one of which is resilience of critical infrastructures and its significance for innovation.

7 mar 2024: Check out the new developments at ISO/IEC joint working group SC42 to promote standardisation of functional safety of AI systems.

23 Jan 2024: The CRITIS 2024 conference will be held in Rome, Italy, on 18-20th September. This partially overlaps with the SmartGridComm 2024 conference that will be held in Olso, Norway, 17-20th September this year.

10 Jan 2024: A detailed account of the use of vulnerability CVE-2023-23397 with attempts to compromise critical infrastructure was disclosed by Palo Alto Networks as one of the last digests of 2023.

7 Dec 2023: ENISA and Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) of US have signed a working arrangement to boost capacity building and best practices exchange.

30 Nov 2023: Following recent bad weather the company Green Mountain Power, proposed buying batteries in a filing with state regulators in Vermont, USA. According to New York Times, the idea of this small utility serving 270,000 homes and businesses is that customers would still use the state infrastructure but invest in television-size batteries.

20 Sep 2023: A presentation by the Swiss researcher Peter Burgherr in last week’s CRITIS conference in Finland showed an interesting assessment method for electricity supply resilience across 35 European countries performed in 2020-21.

20 Sept 2023: Two researchers from RICS presented at the SCADA security conference at Kista which attracted security companies and several other stakeholders.

10 Aug 2023: Miscrosoft has issued several advisories on critical vulnerabilities that can affect PLCs.

7 Jun 2023: ENISA published the report on Cybersecurity and privacy in AI – forecasting demand on electricity grids.

23 May 2023: CISA, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the National Security Agency (NSA), and the Multi-State Information Sharing and Analysis Center (MS-ISAC) published an updated version of the #StopRansomware Guide.

14 Apr 2023: The 23rd Seminar within the Framework of a Swedish IT Security Network for PhD students (SWITS 2023), will take place in Uppsala on 29-30 May in Uppsala this year.

2 Feb 2023: The 18th International Conference on Critical Infrastructure Security (CRITIS) will be held in Helsinki, Finland this year. The dates will be 13-15th September.

23 Jan 2023: ENISA has issued material and guidelines for awareness raising in many sectors. There are DIY toolboxes available for performing the awareness raising games.

16 Jan 2023: A Collaboration conference by Cybernode Sweden is organised in Kista on 26th January 2023. There will be over 150 participants and 30 project presentations.

30 Nov 2022: A RICS-financed PhD student Chih-Yuan (Sana) Lin will defend her thesis on anomaly detection for SCADA networks on 19th December 2022 at 13:15.

11 Nov 2022: Current issues in the security landscape, and the report recently presented by the Swedish engineering sciences academy (IVA) on the topic, were presented and discussed with interested members of the parliament.

24 Oct 2022: Recommended practices for software supply chains security aimed towards developers have been drawn by three US government agencies including CISA.

17 Oct 2022: RICS researchers are contributing to the shaping of national coordination in research, education, and innovation in cybersecurity through the Cybercampus Sweden initiative.

6 Oct 2022: The program for the 27th Nordic Conference on Secure IT systems (NordSec) to be held on 30th Nov.-2nd Dec. is now announced.

29 Aug 2022: The program for the CRITIS 2022 conference has now been posted. This years conference takes place in Münschen 14-16th Sept.

1 Aug 2022: Using electric cars as batteries connected to the grid enters the realm of future power networks.

30 Jun 2022: A recent report on zero days and their relation to earlier known vulnerabilities was published in a project report by Google.

25 May 2022: The relation between stolen credentials and ransomware attacks is explored in this Verizon data breach 2022 report.

19 Apr 2022: The US Dept. of energy, CISA, FBI, and NSA jointly issued an advisory concerning a advanced persistent threat to a number of PLC variants. Link to news item and further reading.

10 Mar 2022: This week the US Senate passed a bill to mandate that critical infrastructure companies report cyber attacks and ransomware payments to the government within 72h and 24h respectively. Once the bill passes in Congress it makes the CISA the lead agency in responding to hacks.

3 Feb 2022: A lot of discussions about the electricity supply-demand and pricing in Sweden and Europe in recent weeks need more in depth studies. This JRC report from 2022 can be illuminating. At least showing the complexities involved.

21 Jan 2022 A new report by ENISA with an update on the Log4J vulnerability is available.

2 Dec 2021: A full disclosure of a sophisticated malware attack on the biomanufacturing (vaccine production) facilities over the past year have been published in November. See the reports on the Tardigrade metamorphic capabilities from Bio-ISAC.

10 Nov 2021: The spin-off company Omen Technologies that was formed based on research results in RICS was acquired by Clavister towards their strategy to become a leading cyber security company in Europe.

20 Oct 2021: ENISA report on threats to supply chains summarises the latest major attack mechanisms.

13 Aug 2021: The paper “Mapping cyber threat intelligence to probabilistic attack graphs” by A. Gylling, M. Ekstedt, Z. Afzal, and P. Eliasson, partly financed by RICS, received best research paper award at the 2021 IEEE International Conference on Cyber Security and Resilience (CSR 2021) in July.

7 Jul 2021: The global threats to IT supply chains became too concrete with some 1500 companies directly affected by ransomware that targeted vulnerabilities in a Kaseya remote management product, and many more indirectly affected by having to turn their systems off for several days, including the Swedish COOP group.

2 Jun 2021: Wissam Aoudi defends his PhD thesis with the title “Process-Aware Defenses for Cyber-Physical Systems” at Chalmers at 10.00 to 13.00. The session is open to the public. For more info please contact Magnus Almgren.

10 May 2021: NSA publishes a report on threat vectors against 5G communication networks.

3 May 2021: Magnus Almgren’s work in RICS together with his PhD student Wissam Aoudi has been noted by the Royal Academy of Swedish Engineering Sciences (IVA) in their IVA-100 list for 2021.

3 May 2021: The 26th edition of the Nordic conference on Secure IT systems (Nordsec) will be virtually held in Tampere, Finland, with the following call for papers. More information to come!

24 Mar 2021: ENISA has issued a situational report on the Microsoft exchange vulnerability that has targeted several exchange servers.

2 Mar 2021: New vulnerabilities were disclosed in the Siemens SICAM A8000 series of remote terminal units through ethical hacking thesis work done by the student Sam Hamra at KTH.

22 Feb 2021: A major Electricity blackout in Texas due to snow storms could have turned in to a long lasting nightmare.

17 Feb 2021: An attack on a water supply system in Florida illustrates the risk of lack of standard security practices when systems are remotely reachable.

9 Feb 2021: A recent report by ENISA that comprehensively discusses security in the railway sector has been released.

7 Dec 2020: The extension of RICS into a phase II of the project will officially start in January 2021!

24 Nov 2020: The two day Nordic conference on IT Security attracted keynote speakers from Purdue University US and ENISA and several speakers from non-Nordic countries. It is now a well-established conference and its next edition will be in Tampere Finland.

3 Nov 2020: Wissam Auodi, researcher from RICS wins a national innovation prize.

30 Oct 2020: The program for Nordsec 2020 conference, being virtually held in Linköping (23-24 November) is now online.

25 Oct 2020: The extension of RICS for three years (2021-2023) will begin by employing two new postdocs at Linköping University.

30 Sep 2020: Two popular science articles about the work done in the project have been published (Swedish):

• Analys av cybersäkerhetsrisker för kritisk infrastruktur
• Att upptäcka pågående cyberintrång inom kritisk infrastruktur

23 Sep 2020: The European Reference Network for Critical Infrastructure Protection (ERNCIP) has published a report with recommendations on ICS components cyber security certification schemes.

1 Sep 2020: Oskar Lindh och Alma Eriksson, students at KTH, have a commentary in the periodical Automation, on the human factor being significant in the incident caused by Triton.

18 Aug 2020: A Thesis by Emma Good at KTH under the supervision of Pontus Johnson and Mathias Ekstedt has disclosed a vulnerability in a Siemens RTU which was promply patched.

17 Jul 2020: The Eurpean strategy for a trusted and cyber secure Europe was presented by ENISA.

24 Jun 2020: While organisations have been busy adapting to the distance working mode the attackers have had plenty of time to pose new threats. The latest is a sophisticated phishing attack through a Microsoft 365 vulnerability that has affected many organisations. A similar attack affected LiU this week.

24 Apr 2020: Energiforsk is starting a new information exchange network about cyber security for companies in the energy sector. Mathias Ekstedt has been tasked to lead it.

21 Apr 2020: Some unexpected inter-dependencies in the age of pandemics: IoT devices by the Japanese SHARP not accessible through the web due the high load on the (same servers) for access to facial masks produced by the same company.

10 Mar 2020: Ransomware is still adversely affecting the operation of  utilities. Here is a recent report from a US utility along with some advice for prevention or mitigation.

27 Feb 2020: The 25th Nordic Conference on Secure IT Systems (Nordsec 2020) can hopefully still be held in Linköping despite the Corona situation. The date is late in November (23-25th).

15 Jan 2020: Best to start 2020 with an update on support for protection of ICS/SCADA systems published nationally (Swedish)!

15 Dec 2019: System updates and water quality impacts – a case reported at Risk Forum to learn from.

19 Nov 2019: The 25th Nordic Conference on IT Security (NordSec) will be held in Linköping November 2020.

21 Oct 2019: Work by RICS researchers in collaboration with FOI will be presented at CS3 STHLM Expo on the 22nd October. The RICS reference group is invited to follow up lunch and meeting in the afternoon.

17 Oct 2019: CRITIS 2019 was a success! See short commentaries in LiU news and about the Young CRITIS award at University of Nottingham.

17 Sep 2019: The program for CRITIS is now finalised. Several invited speakers give insights about the latest developments in critical infrastructure protection, including speakers from EU on national risk assessments, and NIS reporting.

19 Aug 2019: Attacks on major IT systems in Sweden revealed in recent weeks. A security (DoS) breach on the Stockholm public transport systems and a major privacy breach through a system that 40 Swedish government agencies use (Primula).

9 Aug 2019: The program for CRITIS 2019 to be held in Linköping 23-25 September is now posted.

29 May 2019: RICS research will be presented in the annual security networking conference SWITS which will be held in Karlstad this year.

2 May 2019: The program for the DIMVA conference to be held in Göteborg 19-20 June is now determined.

13 Mar 2019: Alerts on the need for attention with respect to the Triton malware spreading are being raised. Check out the overview in MIT technical review.

27 Jan 2019: ZDNet reported about the offensive plans of the Japanese government that approved a law to allow government workers to hack into people’s IoT devices to find vulnerabilities to prepare for Tokyo 2020 games.

3 Dec 2018: The complement to the 2015 law on security for government agencies has now been released as SoU-2018-82 to cover external data management e.g. cloud services.

16 Nov 2018: The international CRITIS 2019 conference on security for Critical Information Infrastructures will take place in Sweden next year.

5 Nov 2018: RICS will present its current work for the FIDI-SC group at MSB on 22nd November.

9 Oct 2018: The RICS Autumn seminar will be by Kevin Jones (Airbus Group) and will take place on 23rd October. Since this coincides with the CS3Sthlm event and expo we have invited Kevin to speak at this event instead. Registration is needed but attendance is free. Please contact RICS for a link to come in as a RICS affiliate.

10 Sep 2018: Norway announces a national cyber range for testing and training cyber security in collaboration with NTNU at Gjövik.

20 Aug 2018: Stakeholders and members of the reference group for RICS will attend the next seminar on RICS results organised at MSB, Friday 24 August 2018.

31 May 2018: RICS research will be presented at the annual SWITS seminar, the national IT-Security network for PhD students. This year SWITS will be combined with the CYCEP summer school at KTH.

30 May 2018: The next RICS seminar will be on 19th June. Dr. Emmanouil Vasilomanolakis from Technical University of Darmstadt will talk about the next generation collaborative network defence. See the events page for details.

13 Mar 2018: A seminar at Chalmers tomorrow is open to all interested. See details on the events page.

9 Feb 2018: Cryptocurrency mining malware has now been found in a water utility network in Europe.

30 Jan 2018: Intel keeps adding information on how to manage the update process for all the chipsets with the embedded Minix operating system in its firmware for which vulnerabilities were disclosed in 2017.

21 Dec 2017: Automatic circuit closers are being probed as possible causes of California forest fires in the past months.

15 Dec 2017: The security Company Fireeye has disclosed a new ICS attack framework dubbed Triton.

21 Nov 2017: Recent results from RICS were presented and discussed at a meeting with the RICS reference group members and stakeholders.

23-27 Oct 2017: How to deal with the EU NIS directive was on the agenda for the CS3STHLM event held in Stockholm, where Paraskevi Kasse from ENISA discussed the available ENISA guidelines for SCADA systems.

24 Oct 2017: Mathias Ekstedt will present results on vulnerability assessment of smart grid ICT infrastructure from RICS and the EU FP7 project SEGRID at the Elvira project workshop.

4-6 Oct 2017: RICS hosts several events on security and privacy of IoT and cyberphysical systems. For details contact Magnus Almgren.

27-29 Sept 2017: RICS presents work and participates in the 4th Cyber Security for Utilities and SCADA Systems event in Amsterdam.

13 Sept 2017: The “NIS toolkit” provides practical information to Member States by presenting best practices from the Member States and by providing explanation and interpretation of specific provisions of the NIS Directive.

22 August 2017: The RICS tutorial and seminar on machine learning will take place this week. See details on the events page.

10 August 2017: The EU project SEGRID (Security for Smart Electricity Grids) will hold its final summit presenting results and demos on October 2nd 2017, preceding the European Utility week in Amsterdam. Registration is free of charge.

29 June 2017: Swedish national IT security strategy was announced by the government, among others requiring the government agencies with special monitoring duties to evaluate their own preparedness.

15 May 2017: WannaCry Ransomware has been detected in Sweden too. The large scale attack may be a turning point for awareness in businesses and industry.

5 May 2017: The ongoing research at RICS will be presented at the national event Elkraft 2017 on 12-13 May.

26 April 2017: RICS will take part and present in the European event on Cyber security for SCADA in September.

23 April 2017: The next RICS seminar will be on deep learning for detecting electricity thefts on 24 August.

9 March 2017: RICS research will be presented at CPSR-SG in April!

22 February 2017: The joint RICS-CERCES workshop program is available!20 February 2017: The Swedish energy policy commission (energimyndigheten) has released its 2017 report for 2025-30 energy policy agreement.

17 January 2017: RICS participates in the seminar “Forskning om samhällets digitalisering: medborgarskap, arbetsliv och innovation” at Göteborgs universitet, and highlights the potential risks of digital infrastructure.

8 January 2017:The water supply in Eslöv municipality was disrupted due to a electricity outage which led to flooding of the pump stations that supply this municipality 6th January.

6 December 2016: RICS will hold a stakeholder workshop in Stockholm on 22 feb 2017 together with the CERCES project.

28 November 2016: The Muni Metro system in San Francisco was affected by a major ransomware attack.

3 November 2016: ENISA’s annual incident reports 2015 is now available.

2 November 2016: Next RICS seminar will be by Gunnar Björmkan (ABB) at Linköping University.

27 October 2016: Updated 4SICS agenda with presentation by Simin Nadjm-Tehrani on anomaly detection.

29 September 2016: RICS research was presented at the 3rd SCADA and Cyber Security Meeting in Berlin.

29 September 2016: Research from RICS was presented at the 3rd SCADA and Cyber Security meeting in Berlin.

2 September 2016: RICS partners from KTH will disseminate in an open workshop organised by the European project SEGRID in the European Utility Week event, Barcelona, 15-17 November.

30 August 2016: RICS partners from Linköping University will participate in the 4SICS event this Autumn (25-27 October). Checkout the program!

6th July 2016: EU Directive 2016/1148, known as the Network and Information Security Directive was approved by the European Parliament. It is the first ever set of common EU rules in the field of cybersecurity. The most important aspect of the Directive is the introduction of new notification obligations. Both operators of essential services and digital service providers, will be obliged to report serious security incidents to national authorities.

30 May 2016: RICS  will be presenting at the national Hydro Power Days, 22 September 2016.

17 May 2016: The program for the Swedish security research network seminar (SWITS) to be held in Linköping 9-10 June, 2016 is now available.

8 apr 2016: Recent reports on the increase in attempts to compromise security in the energy sector and oil and gas sector have been published.

11 March 2015:  European-wide online security measures are in the pipeline as described by the EU press release, with specific mention of energy, water, and Health sectors.

3 Mar 2016: The next RICS seminar will be by Yulia Cherdantseva from Cardiff University. The talk covers a recent Review of risk assessment methods that is currently the most downloaded paper in the Computers & Security category in ScienceDirect.

18 Feb 2016: RICS will host the next seminar of EBITS (The Swedish Energy working Group on Information Security) on 12-13th April at Linköping.

15 Feb 2016: The next annual meeting of SWITS, the network for all PhD students and advisors in the area of IT security in Sweden, will be held in Linköping on 9-10 June 2016. The program will appear here as soon as abstracts are selected.

11 January 2016: During 23rd December 2015 a major blackout was observed on Ukrainian electricity distribution networks. A preliminary analysis made by the SANS institute  is indicating a targeted attack.

21 December 2015: The new year will bring new requirements on reporting IT incidents by Swedish government agencies. See documents making the background analysis in preparation of the new laws (Swedish SOU_2015_23 and SOU_2015_25).

17 December 2015: Maria Vasilevskaya from Linköping University has defended her thesis successfully.

2 Dec 2015: An international pledge at the G20 summit meeting against cyber attacks for economic espionage for the first time.

16 Nov 2015: Data sharing and data-driven security research is high on agenda in Cambridge computer Lab project.

9 Nov 2015: The U.S. Department of Energy has selected the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign to lead a new five-year, $28.1 million initiative (CREDC) that will develop cyber resilient energy delivery systems for the electric power and oil & gas industries.

30 Oct 2015: PhD thesis by Maria Vasilevskaya on security in embedded systems will be defended at Linköping University on 17th December 2015, at 13.15.

26 Oct 2015: In August 2015 the German Federal Networks Agency (Bundesnetzagentur) issued requirements for electricity and gas operators to enforce minimum levels of security. More info.

19 Oct 2015: RICS will be presented at TAMSEC 2015 (within MSB:s annual fair on “Samsällssäkehet”) in November.

29 Sept 2015: The USA Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Science and Technology Directorate announced the award of eight contracts totaling $14 million for research on technologies to defend against Distributed Denial of Service Defenses (DDoS) attacks.

23 Sept 2015: RICS will be presented at the 4Sics event.

14 Sept 2015: NSF invests $20 million to enhance resilience of critical infrastructure.

7 Sept 2015: The centre was launched 1 September 2015.