Industry leaders discussed the impact of cybersecurity incidents on stock markets

The meeting of the Industrial Cybersecurity Club (ICS-Club), established by Norilsk Nickel in 2017, took place in Moscow at the end of September.

Dmitry Grigoriev, Director of Department: Analytic, Information and IT Infrastructure protection of Norilsk Nickel, Director of the ICS-Club, welcomed the participants: “The ICS-Club unites the heads of information security divisions of the leading industrial corporations of Russia, whose activities are of strategic importance for the national economy. Information security in industry must be uncompromising, because illegal and malicious impact on the information infrastructure of enterprises can have extremely negative socio-economic consequences for the regions, where those companies operate, and have a tangible impact on macroeconomic indicators of the country in general - this explains the topic we are discussing at today’s meeting”.

Elena Merekina, PhD, representative of the Economic Faculty of Moscow State University and Nikita Leushin Head of the Division of Information Security management of Norilsk Nickel were the keynote speakers at the meeting. “Norilsk Nickel's approach to ensuring information security is comprehensive. One of the areas of our activities is a large-scale analytical work aimed at identifying risks and minimizing threats, including through studying market trends,” Leushin commented. The topic aroused great interest among the participants of the meeting, the discussion continued after the official part of the event. “As a theoretician, I was interested in studying the practical side of this issue and hear participants’ assessments and conclusions based on their operational experience,” Elena Merekina noted.

The second report “Encrypting ransomware in industrial networks. What's new?" was presented by the co-founder of the Russian professional community for industrial cybersecurity RUSCADASEC Anton Shipulin. According to him, recently the number of ransomware attacks on the industrial sector has increased significantly, while it is very difficult to build effective protection of industrial companies from this type of threat, and the size and cost of potential losses if attackers succeed can become catastrophic.

Andrey Kulpin, Head of the IT Infrastructure Protection Division of Norilsk Nickel, summed up the event: “The ideas voiced today can become a starting point for further research, including within this platform - this will be an important practical result of our work. The participants’ active involvement in the discussion suggests that the ICS-Club covers the most acute information security issues.”

For reference

RUSCADASEC is an independent non-profit initiative aimed at developing an open international community of specialists in industrial cybersecurity.

The goals of the initiative are: to increase awareness and qualification of specialists in security and industrial automation, to develop professional ties between specialists and organizations, to promote market development, to develop relations with relevant international communities, and as a result, to increase the level of safety of industrial enterprises. The initiative covers online platforms, live meetings and specialized conferences.