Speaker 1: The idea that someone might impact a bunch of vehicles
to cause accidents. It's real that absolutely could happen.
Speaker 2: Welcome everyone to the Industrial Security Podcast. My name is
Nate Nelson. I'm here with Andrew Ginter, the vice president
of Industrial Security at Waterfall Security Solutions, who's going to
introduce the subject and guest of our show today. Andrew,
how's it going.
Speaker 3: I'm very well, Thank you, Nate. Our guest today is
Matt McKinnon, the director of Global Strategic Alliances at Upstream Security.
And I don't know if you remember a number of
episodes ago, we had a gentleman on talking about the
canvas in automobiles, you know, the hundreds of CPUs in
a modern automobile, and you know how that canvas, you know,
that network of automation reached out to the cloud, to
the vendor cloud whoever built the automobile, Matt, you know,
and Upstream secure that cloud. So we're going to be
talking about the security of cloud systems connected to automobiles.
Speaker 2: Then, without further Ado, here's your conversation with Matt.
Speaker 3: Hell On, Matt, and welcome to the show. Before we
get started, can I ask you to introduce yourself to
say a few words about your background and about the
good work that you're doing at Upstream Security.
Speaker 1: Hey, Andrew, thanks for having me today. Yeah. I've been
working in network security or cybersecurity in general for the
better part of the last twenty five years. Got started
in network security, endpoint security, IoT security, did even some
DoD work, and some cloud security, so kind of been
around the cybersecurity market in a lot of different ways.
Most recently, I've been working in automotive or mobility IoT security.
This is in particular where I am today is Upstream Security,
where we protect cars and trucks and tractors and pretty
much anything that moves around and it's connected via cell
you a network. I was really drawn to this company
because of the connection between mobility and things that physical,
things that move around in cybersecurity, and it really is
easy to relate to everyday life and very rewarding to
be able to work on something that we can sort
of see and feel and observe in our every day And.
Speaker 3: Our topic today is automobiles. I mean, we had a
guest on a little while ago talking about the CANbus,
in automobiles, in trucks, in you know, things that move.
You're not talking about the CANbus. You're still talking about
things that move, but you're up in the cloud. Can
you explain to us, you know, what is that, what's
what's happening out there, how does it work, and why
should we be worried.
Speaker 1: It's a great question, and it's really important to think
about what's happening with with cars and with trucks and
how they operate today and what's and how we think
they're going to change in the future as well. So
if we think about your modern car, it has really
got a lot of computers in it, everything from the
infotainment system to you know, the most modern things have
autonomous driving. So those those cars, they the car itself
can be can be compromised. Those cars communicate with the cloud.
They send a lot of telematic data about where they
are and what they're doing into the cloud. This is
very useful for a lot of different purposes. We also
have AP apps on our phones. We can schedule a
remote start, or we can schedule service of the dealer
and things like that in our phones. When we get
into electronic vehicles, we have to charge them, and so
we connect them to charging stations and we have to
authenticate and pay for pay for electricity, and so what
what Upstream is realized and recognized many years ago was that,
you know, no longer can you worry about just securing
the car itself. The car is part of this connected ecosystem,
and if you're not looking at that ecosystem at once,
you're really not looking at the full, full spectrum of
what can be compromised. The other thing that's interesting to
look at from the last five or ten years is
Upstream does an annual report about the state of automotive cybersecurity,
and we've been doing it since about twenty nineteen. There's
really been a pretty dramatic shift in the cybersecurity or
automotive cybersecurity over that time. You know, if you look
back twenty fourteen twenty fifteen, people were trying to compromise
or hack or steal one car at a time. But
if you look at the data today, that's not the
case at all. Over ninety five percent of the attacks
that happened last year didn't even require physical access to
the vehicle at all. Over fifty percent of the attacks
that happened last year, we're attacks against thousands, if not millions,
of vehicles at one time. So we're no longer talking
about bad actors going after just trying to steal your
car or my car. We're talking about bad actors who
are really going after these connected systems. Though we just
talked about and how can they compromise that entire system,
not as one card at time?
Speaker 2: Andrew, Before we get into all of the detail of
what he said there, can you just give me a
brief over few We've talked about it in a couple
of episodes before. But what does the threat attack surface
of my car look like? Because I have some notion
that you know, my center console is a computer and
maybe some other parts of the car, but it sounds
like it's more than that.
Speaker 3: Yeah, we had Ken Tindall on and he was one
of the designers of the Canvas, which is the dominant
communications system that's used in modern vehicles. I recalled that.
He said, look, Andrew, at the rate at which we're
adding features to the vehicles. So, for example, if you
have a feature that says you can only start the
car if your foot's on the brake, he says, for
each feature, we used to run a wire, a small
wire with an analog signal from let's say the brake
sensor directly to the logic that controlled the key and
the ignition. And there was a lot of features being added,
and so for every feature, when one part of the
car was relevant to another part of the car, you
had to run a new wire. He said. They did
a projection at the rate at which new features were
being added. They figured that new cars by the year
twenty fifty would be solid copper, which is of course nonsense,
and so they invented the canvas. And so now most
devices in vehicles that are relevant to a feature, like
you know, the brakes, you know, when you're starting a
car or something like that, they have a little CPU
and they get power on one wire. They get the
network communications on another little wire. And now every piece
of the car has one, you know, two wires or
maybe one if you can run both power and signal
over the same wire, has one or two wires running.
It was not a gazillion one for each of feature
that is affecting another part of the car, which means
a modern car has two or three hundred CPUs in
it with you know, each CPU has a little wire
or two running to it. This is this is the
modern vehicle. There's a lot of software in the vehicle.
Speaker 2: And then how does that connect to Matt's domain the cloud.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so many vehicles are connected through the cellular network
or by other means, but you know, satellite, whatever. But
most often I think it's cellular to the vendor, whoever
made the car, or you know, Matt's business upstream is
upstream security is interested in the big eighteen wheelers, in tractors,
in anything that moves. But let's stay with cars for now.
You know, you buy a car from whoever, you know, Chrysler, Ford, whatever.
A lot of the cars are connected cellularly into the
cloud so that you know, you can on your cell
phone start them remotely and effect charging. For electric vehicles,
there's you know, these networks of two and three hundred
CPUs in the vehicle are now connected through the Internet
into cloud systems. And of course anything connected through the
Internet can be attacked through the Internet. The cloud systems
can be attacked through the Internet. And this is the
focus of today's conversation is what's happening in these cloud
systems and how are they being protected.
Speaker 2: Maybe you get to this later in the interview. I
don't know, but The statement that stood out most to
me already from Matt was this notion that over fifty
percent of attacks that happened in the last year were
against like thousands or millions of vehicles at one time. Now, I, personally,
I don't know if I'm just not up on the news.
Have never heard of a cyber attack against a vehicle
that wasn't conducted in a laboratory setting or in an
experiment of some kind. So what exactly was Matt referring
to there?
Speaker 3: Well, that's a good question, and that, in fact is
kind of the next question, and I asked our guests,
so why don't we get back to Matt and have
him give us the answer first? So that's a lot,
you know, one hundreds thousands, millions of vehicles at once.
Can you give us an example? What what has happened?
What are we worried is going to happen?
Speaker 1: Yeah, there's there's a variety of things that are happening.
And I can give you a couple of real world
of examples, things that we've seen in our in our
in our company's interaction. So a couple of things. One
is what what we like to call sort of a
vind spray attack, and this is kind of interesting. So
imagine a bad actor using their app on their phone
to actually try to authenticate to many vehicles at one time,
so not just connecting to their car, but connecting to
many vehicles at one time. If you can trick a
user into accepting sure you can connect. Now you've basically
given control over of your vehicle and can remote start
or modify your still date off your car. Don't have
to be anywhere near you could be those out of
the world, but use the APIs that are connecting your
phone like you are supposed to, but using it in
a malicious way. Similar kinds of examples with using enterprise
IT and API security type of techniques to generate tokens
to connect to many vehicles at one time execute remote commands.
But also also cases that aren't directly stealing data, things
like odometer fraud to roll back odometers so that your
mileage on your car isn't as high as it you
think or it really is, to be able to get
a warranty claim, or stealing stealing power from an EVY
charging station. So these are all variations on real, real
things that are happening right now today. Some are very
bad with people trying to take over other things. Are
people trying to steal data and other times just people
trying to sort of steal service or steal steal money.
Speaker 3: So can we talk a little bit about who's doing this?
I mean rolling back the odometer. You know, anybody who
wants to cheat someone does this for their vehicle, for
one vehicle. You know, there's little benefit to be had
in rolling back the odometer for a million vehicles. You know,
so people might want tamper with their own vehicle. Who's
tampering with other vehicles?
Speaker 1: Why?
Speaker 3: Why would people do? This's what's in it for them?
Speaker 1: It's a good question. And you know, like a lot
of things, at the end of the day, a lot
of times it just comes down to money. A lot
of these attacks are based around stealing data and that
and stealing data can be done by anybody, a lot
of you know, people all over the world, bad organizations
that are is ransomware. Effectively, it's just a specific variety
of ransomware, people trying to steal data, sell data collected
from a variety of things. There's another aspect which we're
not seeing a whole lot of, but it is definitely
a concern, which would be sort of the brand damage
kind of thing. Imagine if someone were able to take
control over an entire an entire fleet of vehicles, some brand,
some might make in model, the impact of the fear
that they would arise if that certain variety I don't
want to name a specific one obviously, but would just
stop working tomorrow morning, right, That would be tremendously upsetting
to many, many people. So there's a variety of things there,
but at the end of the day, the vast majority
of it is really about stealing data that they can
sell on other variations on ransomware and trying to get
data from these automotive manufacturers.
Speaker 3: You know, we're on the Industrial Security podcast. I worry
about heavy industry. Now, what I don't know is, you know,
how diverse the North American fleet of eighteen wheelers the
big heavy trucks are. But I'm wondering, you know, is
it credible that let's say a nation state, you know,
Russia or China, someone who is involved in a physical
conflict and wants to impair, you know, the delivery of
goods in either the country they're fighting with or an
allies like us of let's say the Ukraine. Is it
credible that the Russians could break into one or two
or three vendors the you know, the people who build
the big eighteen wheelers and I don't know, remotely turn
them all off like cripple a third of the nation's
eighteen wheeler fleet by by GPS coordinate. Is that is
that a credible scenario?
Speaker 1: You know it is? And there's there's sort of two
different dimensions that are worth talking about. There. One is,
as you're describing, you know, trucking is a huge part
of our critical infrastructure. And the you know, the CEASUS
definition of what is critical infrastructure, and it ranges from manufacturing,
emergency services and food and agriculture and healthcare and public safety.
And it's true that if you're able to impact transportation,
you can impact massively important components of the of the
economy and our defense systems. So to your specific question,
you know, can you can you go after trucks and
disable a fleet when we're talking about cybersecurity, the big
trucks are no different than cars, unfrankly heavy machinery for
you know, manufacturing or mining or agriculture, as they're really
all connected in very similar kind of ways, and we
have actually seen real, real attacks like that. You know,
last year there was an attack against something that's called
an electronic logging device. It's not actually the truck itself,
it's actually an IoT device that gets installed in a truck,
and that device is used primarily for logging things like
hours of service, speed and location, and used for expense management,
fuel attax records, and things like that. But they're also
connected directly to the trucks and to the CANbus of
the trucks, so they become an attack factor. And if
you can compromise this device, you know, have access to
the actual operating system of the truck. And this did
happen last year. It was pretty pretty massive. You know,
there's over fourteen million trucks in the United States that
they use these things. I don't know how many of
them were actually impacted, but these devices were out for
a better part of a month. Drivers had to report
to paper and pencil to be able to track and
log their hours, and to my knowledge, didn't actually impact
the safety of those vehicles. Like your worst case scenario
that you describemcginder didn't actually happen, but it gave us
a real sort of eye opener of how close you
could get if you really wanted to.
Speaker 2: I was waiting for Matt to give some real life
examples there, and it sounds interesting, although despite the severity
of the case, I mean, he only mentioned it in
one or two sentences. Andrew, I'm wondering if you have
any more detail about that story he just referenced, or
any other similar ones like it.
Speaker 3: Well, I mean, Waterfall does a threat report, and I
remember considering that incident for the threat report. Our criteria
are different though. We count events that had physical consequences.
And I remember looking at this event and saying, you know,
the logging was impaired, but the physical process the trucks
kept moving. They still delivered goods all over the nation.
They weren't delayed at all. You know, some of the
electronics the logging mechanism was impaired, and the operators, the
drivers of the trucks had to fall back to manual operations,
but the trucks kept going, you know. In in the
report what what I recall, you know, in transportation is
the second biggest industry hit by cyber attacks where there
were physical consequences, and most of those incidents were where
it systems were impaired that were essential to let's say,
dispatching the trucks, so you had to stop the movement
of the trucks because you couldn't figure out where stuff
had to go anymore, shipments were delayed. This is the
most common you know, sort of physical consequence of attacks
where there were physical consequences in transportation. But this, you know,
the scenario here where the where the clouds involved, This
is sort of more reminiscent of a story we talked
about a few episodes ago, you know, in the UK
train the battlefront with the you know, the Russian invasion
moved back and forth, and at one point the Russian
army stole a bunch of John Deere farm equipment, five
million dollars worth of it from a small town that
they'd taken over from a John Deere dealership. John Deere
was unhappy with this, you know, having their stolen equipment
driven seven hundred kilometers into Russia. And so they reached
through the cloud because they have cloud connections to all
these vehicles, and turned off all of the stolen equipment.
So that's an example not of a cyber attack, but
of a capability that you know, a lot of people
looked at that incident and said, you know, yay, stick
it to the to the invaders, and then they said,
just a minute, what just happened here? What if what
if John Deeer gets it into their head to turn
off all of the vehicles, all of the the tractors
in Europe at planting at planting time? What if the
Russians get it into their head to break into the
John Deere cloud and do that. So this is you know,
this is kind of the scenario that we worry about.
But in the the Upstream Threat Report, most of the
incidents I saw had to do with, you know, affecting
thousands or millions of vehicles, had to do with theft
of information from those vehicles and holding it for ransom.
One of the reasons I asked you on as a
guest is because you folks in Upstream have stuff that
I've never heard of to address this problem. So, you know,
having defined the problem, as you know, cloud systems can
reach into cars and you know they're on the internet,
they can be compromised, can you talk about your solution?
What do you guys do and how does that work?
Speaker 1: If I were to make it for those are your
listeners that are at enterprise IT or familiar with enterprise security,
Maybe I'll make analogy and then I can dive into
the details. So the analogy for if you're if you
understand sort of endpoint security or those kind of network
security you're coming, you're familiar with the termin of an
XDR platform, then you also need to or the operation
center to manage that, and you probably want some threat
intelligence to support that. And that's effectively what we've developed
for you know, mobile mobile devices, cars and trucks and
tractors in otherwise, So the three components there really are
that XDR platform and what does that mean? That means
we collect data from the vehicle itself, from the Telemannix cloud,
from the APIs that are calling in and out of it,
and we stitched that all together in the cloud in
what it amounts to a digital twin of a vehicle.
So for every vehicle we're monitoring, we monitor over twenty
five million vehicles today, we've got a digital twin up
exactly what it is, where it's going, what it's doing,
how fast it's going. Everything from oil pressure to geolocation
to you know what was the last remote command that
came to it from from some API in the in
the cloud. That gives us the ability to look for anomalies,
look for patterns of bad behavior, to identify something like, hey,
why did a remote start of that vehicle come from
a country that the vehicle isn't in, or little things
like that that are seem very simple on the surface
but are very complex to see unless you have the
breadth of data that we do. So that's one piece,
that's the technology piece. You then need someone to actually
to actually operate this thing, right, So a security operation
center or we've coined the term the vehicle SoC or
the VSC. You know, a lot of a lot of
operator that don't really have this capability of the skill
set themselves. So we offer that as a service on
top of our platform if you want. Sometimes people would
do it themselves. Sometimes people bring in an MSSP to
do it. The last component of the solution, though, of course,
is threat intelligence, and there's lots of vendors out there,
lots of providers that will do that intelligence for classic
enterprise things and some ot things, but what we do
there is very very specific to the automotive industry. Of
every engine control unit and software version and hardware version,
and you know there are cars are aggregations of many
many components. So we take that whole software building materials,
hardware building materials, and we actually have a team that
goes in does research and on the deep web, the
dark web, interacts with the bad guys and figures out
what they're up to you. And so when you put
that all together, the XDR like monitoring the SoC service
to actually operate the platform, and then the threat intelligence
of what are the what are the bad guys really
doing and what are they working on, you end up
with this really complete end to end solution for being
able to determine and monitor and make sure that vehicles
and these devices are are actually secure.
Speaker 3: So you just described a detective capability, you know, detection,
threat intel, sort of deep knowledge of deep understanding of
stuff when there's an incident. Do you also respond and
recover and you know, to prevent incidents? Do you have
anything that you embed in the vehicles or in the
cloud of your protected customers?
Speaker 1: Yeah, so you're right, our primary focus is on detection
and but all those other sort of respond and recover
and protection are are equally as important. So you're right,
we aren't. We are not in line. We don't have
a way of ourselves to natively block something that's happening,
but we do that via integration and the partner ecosystem
around us. So it may be that there if it
is a sort of more modern vehicle, that is a
software defined vehicle, then there's there are ways that we
can send We can actually send commands or updates back
to a vehicle to tell it to stop a behavior
or to integrate with the network itself. So if a
device is cellular connected, can we talk to the cellular
provider to drop that connection to do that. So we
can't do it directly, but we can integrate to do
it from a from a protection like in the design
time phase. We do work with the automotive manufacturers directly themselves,
the chip makers, as well as the software providers and
everybody from red Hat to Amazon and Google to Qualcom
on others where we're involved and can be influential in
the way that those systems are designed, using our threat intelligence,
using our knowledge of what bad actors are doing to
help make sure that there is a secure development process
and that these devices have the right level on board
protection in place.
Speaker 3: And you folks have been doing this for a while.
You have customers, you know, the big automobile makers all
over the world. Can you talk about your customer's experience
using this technology, you know what, what have you been finding,
what's a value to them.
Speaker 1: It's very interesting to see what people people can use
the platform for. We do see a lot of cyber attacks,
and we talked about the vin Spray and some of
the API examples before, but the platform we have, the
visibility and of ability that we provide definitely lends itself
to a bunch of other things. We're seeing customers use
the platform for identifying theft, stolen vehicles, and seeing vehicles
being in places they shouldn't be. We're seeing fleet fleet
operators use the data that we have to be able
to monitor where fleets are, are the vehicles being used appropriately,
you know, everything from you know, fast accelerations and breaking
hard to other types of usage and mileage for fleet management.
The other one that's emerging, the other use case that's
emerging to be more common is related to electronic vehicles
and the use of their batteries, and there's a lot
of new behaviors people need to learn about properly managing
a battery, how do you charge it, when do you
charge it, things like that, and we can provide some
really interesting insights to those kind of use cases, so
customer satisfaction kind of things as well.
Speaker 3: There.
Speaker 1: So it is, it is one of the sort of
fascinating and fun things about the company and the product
and the technology is the uses of the technology beyond
just traditional cybersecurity.
Speaker 3: Nate, let me jump in here. You know, the reason
I asked that question of Matt is that he's got
basically a detective you know, intrusion detection attack del technology here.
And what I've observed is that whenever almost you know,
whenever we deploy a detective technology into an OT system,
we get operational insights as well as security insights. So,
you know, I remember twenty years ago when I was
deploying intrusion detection systems, the first intrusion detection systems that
went into industrial networks. You know, the engineers at the
site would be looking over you know, our people's shoulders
while we were tuning the system, you know, tuning out
false alarms and you know, figuring out the right way
to report on these systems, and they'd look over our
shoulders and say, what's that. That's you know, a lot
of traffic between you know, a a the engineering workstation
and a particular PLC sucking up you know, eighty percent
of the bandwidth of the network going to that you know,
family of PLCs. What is that? And you know we
dig into it and well, you know, a test had
had been left running on the on the engineering workstation
that should have been turned off. This is why the
whole system was a little bit sluggish, not slow enough
that anyone raised an alarm about it. But you know,
once you lift the lid on these OT systems and
you see what's inside, you know, often there's operational benefits.
I mean, you know, Matt talked about electric vehicles. Batteries
are a huge part of electric vehicles. And these batteries,
you know, they're chemical systems. You know, if you deep
discharge them or don't deep discharge them enough, or you know,
charge them you know suboptimally, battery life is reduced the
lifetime of the battery years of battery life, the you know,
the range you get on the battery. And so you know,
the sense I had is that that before you know,
the upstream security technology went in fleet vehicle owners, and
you know, electric vehicle vendors might not have had the data.
They didn't have the instrumentation to figure out together all
this data. Well, Upstream gathered all the data to figure
out if there was an attacking progress, looked at the
data and said nope, there's no attacking progress, and then
go back to the vendors and say, by the way,
we have all this data, would you like to use
it to change the design or improve the design or
optimize the design of your electric vehicles so your batteries
last longer. Yes, please, so you know the you know,
a lesson here is that there's there's often secondary benefits
to deploying detective security measures. You get insights by looking
at data that you just didn't have before. You know
what I worry about, as you know, someone involved in
industrial cybersecurity, heavy industry minds, you know, high speed passenger trains.
I always worry about safety. We've talked about sort of
credible threats to safety sort of as as future concerns.
Can you talk about what's happening there?
Speaker 2: How?
Speaker 3: How worried should I be about the safety of my
cloud connected vehicle.
Speaker 1: It's a it's a really important topic. I think the
good news is from your as an individual consumer. Should
you be worried about your connected vehicle from a safety perspective,
you know, probably not. I certainly don't worry about, you know,
driving my car every day. But I think on a
grander scale, safety really is important. Right. The fact that
we're talking about these software you know, software software in vehicles,
the connection between software and the physical world. You've got
you know, vehicles, cars, trucks, tractors. These things are thousands
of pounds, They move at very high speeds. The implication
of a of a cyber incident to safety is pretty dramatic. Unfortunately,
we're not seeing that a whole uh but it is
possible and and and certainly could could could happen. And
so the idea that someone might impact a bunch of
vehicles to cause accidents, uh is is real that that
absolutely could happen. We have seen not quite not quite safety,
but we've seen attacks that were designed to cause congestion
and gridlock by uh, you know, sort of car services
all being called into one one location and causing gridlock.
And that causes a lot of you know, people start
to panic and when there's gridlock, and so there's variations
on safety. But but the other related concept that I
think is also really important is actually a sort of
borrow it from the military world, and that is the
concept of readiness, and it applies to almost any industry really,
and that is your vehicle ready. And today today a
lot of people think about vehicles and readiness. They think about,
you know, is their gas in the in the tank?
Is the did you change the oil? And is there
you air and the tires. Well, well, now that these
vehicles are also software defined or have software connectivity, readiness
includes is it CyberSecure? Has someone impacted from a cybersecurity perspective?
And so it's not a concept that I hear a
lot of talk about today, but I do think it's
something we're going to see more and more, especially in
industries like then rely on on on vehicles for their
business like delivery and trucking and things like that.
Speaker 3: You know, you are deep into automotive cybersecurity. You know,
we've we've covered in this podcast. You know a bit
of what's happening in the vehicle, you know, with you folks,
a bit of what's happening in the cloud. What's the
future hold? What what is the future of of you know,
automation in in vehicles large and small.
Speaker 1: Yeah, what we're seeing for sure is what is known
in the industry as the software defined vehicle, where really
the cars and trucks and tractors and all these devices
become you know, first computers first, in vehicle second almost
and so that increases the attack surface. I mean, the
power of these vehicles is pretty amazing and what they
can do, and we've all been watching, you know, the
future of autonomous driving, but that also applies to connecting
agriculture and autonomous agriculture, robotics in all sorts of ways. Right,
So we're seeing more and more of these vehicles or
mobile devices become connected and become software defined, and that
has amazing business benefits and productivity benefits that we're all
going to see you all going to benefit from. But
it does increase the attack surface and just make these
things much much more complicated and much more harder insecure.
So it is an area that is rapidly evolving. You know,
we'd be remiss to talk about this without throwing in
the implications of gen AI and how that's how then
the data that these things are going to generate, and
how that's going to both make the bad guys better
and make the and make us better at protecting. But yeah,
the software defined vehicle, the increase of increased volume of
software in vehicles is really the future of the industry.
But then, you know, the impacts of cybersecurity are.
Speaker 3: Clear software defined vehicles. That's that's a scary thought for
someone like me who's focused on you know, the worst
that can possibly happen. But you know, if we have
people working on the problem, I'm confident we can we
can work something out. That's that's going to keep us
all safe. Thank you for bringing these insights and you know,
these worries to the podcast. Before I let you go,
can I ask you, can you sum up for our listeners?
What are what are the key takeaways here?
Speaker 1: Yeah? Thanks Andrew, I actually come. I would start by
reiterating just what you just said, which is, you know,
the good news is for the average consumer, the average driver,
it's just not something you have to spend that much
time worried about. The manufacturers are taking it seriously. There's
you know, you know, software vendors like Upstream that are
taking it seriously. We're working on it. It does happen,
but it's not something everybody needs to like don't self driving.
The next thing though, is also be aware that this
isn't just about cars right there are it's cars as trucks.
I've alluded to agriculture and tractors. But this is continuing
to get bigger and bigger. The notion of software defined
anything and software defined vehicles of all varieties is growing,
not slowing down. As we get into autonomous vehicles, that's
going to make it even more and more complex. So
don't worry about it too much, but it is. It
is getting bigger at the same time. And the last
thing is just you know, this is what we do
it upstream. The company was formed for this, it's what
we do. We take it seriously. We also care very
much about sort of giving back and contributing, and that's
why we do the annual report and the research that
we do that we publish, host webinars, most of which
is information, information sharing and thought leadership and not trying
to not trying to sell stuff. So please please check
us out and take a look at that report. It
is free and anybody can anybody can take a look
at it, and we'll have we're already starting to work
on next year. Is now.
Speaker 2: So and true cars are a microcosm or cybersecurity at large.
Speaker 3: Indeed, and you know the cloud is coming. The cloud
is coming, and you know it's coming to many industries.
You know, in my experience, manufacturing, all kinds of manufacturing
is using cloud systems quite intensively. You know, more sort
of conventional critical infrastructure, water systems, power plants are using
cloud systems somewhat and increasingly, you know, and it looks like,
you know, the cloud has arrived for automobiles and other
kinds of moving equipment and is being used fairly intensively,
and all of those uses I think are going to increase.
This is this is the future. And of course what
we have then is you know, lots more software involved,
lots of opportunity to attack that software. You know, attacks
are targeting cloud systems and there you know, can be
physical consequences. So this is you know, it's a I think
it's a big new field. It's just going to become
more important as the years go by. And is I
guess something more, something new to worry about in the
field of industrial cybersecurity.
Speaker 2: Well, with that, thank you to Matt McKinnon for his
interview with you and Andrew. As always, thank you for
speaking with me.
Speaker 3: It's always a pleasure tonight. Thank you.
Speaker 2: This has been the Industrial Security Podcast from Waterfall. Thanks
to everyone out there listening