Aaron Crow
Appearances
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Safeguarding the Grid and the Plate: OT Insights with Aaron Crow, Host of PrOTect IT All Podcast
Well, and we saw so many supply chain issues during COVID like it really brought to it. It brought to bear how bad our supply chain in general was. We're already concerned with global warming and population and all of these things. You know, the way that we do farming today with, they talk about how our topsoil is, we have limited... Yes, we're limited in how we can do that.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Safeguarding the Grid and the Plate: OT Insights with Aaron Crow, Host of PrOTect IT All Podcast
And regenerative farming is the way of the future. But how do we feed everybody with that method? And there's just so many things that go into that. You hit on something that I repeated probably a hundred times this week in all the conversations in Vegas, talking at Black Hat and DEF CON. And it's OT a lot of the times. It's not sexy.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Safeguarding the Grid and the Plate: OT Insights with Aaron Crow, Host of PrOTect IT All Podcast
The things that I need to do in the very beginning are not AI and quantum computing and all of these fancy buzzwords. Most of the time, it's very basic. You know, do I have a recovery plan? Do I know where my critical assets are? Do I have an asset list? Do I have a recovery option? Have I executed that thing? Does everybody know what part they play? It's usually basic, basic things.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Safeguarding the Grid and the Plate: OT Insights with Aaron Crow, Host of PrOTect IT All Podcast
tackling, right? And it's not all technology-based. Maybe, let's say it's 50%, which I don't even think it is that. Less than half of it is finding a technology solution, which there's some of the vendors that I work with that don't like it when I say that. I'm sorry, but it's the truth, right?
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Safeguarding the Grid and the Plate: OT Insights with Aaron Crow, Host of PrOTect IT All Podcast
There is no product I can grab off the shelf that's going to take away all the risk if I install it in an OT environment. I wish there were, but there's not. There's just not.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Safeguarding the Grid and the Plate: OT Insights with Aaron Crow, Host of PrOTect IT All Podcast
We have droughts, global warming, fun times. Well, a friend of mine is I won't name the name, but a friend of mine works at a social media company with a very large data center. There's there's there's quite a few of them. It doesn't matter which one it is, but they have millions of PLC's millions.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Safeguarding the Grid and the Plate: OT Insights with Aaron Crow, Host of PrOTect IT All Podcast
controlling all sorts of things from temperature to pressures to, you know, lights and air conditioning and valve. Like there's so much there's halon systems and all these different things. Buildings have OT like any skyscraper, even not even a skyscraper, just a normal building you walk into. There's controls around sprinkler systems and all these different things. OT is everywhere.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Safeguarding the Grid and the Plate: OT Insights with Aaron Crow, Host of PrOTect IT All Podcast
We just didn't always classify as such. Like it's a new term, relatively new term. It's been around forever. We've been doing automation since the fifties. and before really, but automation has been around. We've just started putting the technology side and putting IP addresses on it.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Safeguarding the Grid and the Plate: OT Insights with Aaron Crow, Host of PrOTect IT All Podcast
So we brought these other risks into this space, but the OT's been here for, I mean, my dad worked in power utility for 40 something years. He's in his mid seventies now. He's been doing this this whole time. He was never cyber related. It was always control systems and control engineer and automation and instrumentation and even continuing emissions monitoring as that came in to be a thing.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Safeguarding the Grid and the Plate: OT Insights with Aaron Crow, Host of PrOTect IT All Podcast
But all of these things have been around for decades. We're just solving new problems to old, adding new problems to existing and older problems.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Safeguarding the Grid and the Plate: OT Insights with Aaron Crow, Host of PrOTect IT All Podcast
Absolutely. And the talk I gave it at DEF CON actually in the ICS Village was about cyber informed engineering, which came out of a term came out of Idaho National Labs, which is a DOE sponsored laboratory. And the whole concept around it is we need to build cyber as part of the overall system. and integrate that when I'm designing the system, cyber needs to be considered, right?
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Safeguarding the Grid and the Plate: OT Insights with Aaron Crow, Host of PrOTect IT All Podcast
We've got old equipment, we've got legacy equipment, we've got new equipment. Anywhere in there, we need to be considering cyber as a risk and as a part of our remediation. How are we going to recover?
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Safeguarding the Grid and the Plate: OT Insights with Aaron Crow, Host of PrOTect IT All Podcast
When we say cyber, people that are outside of this or even people at DEFCON and Black Hat, when I had this conversation, they immediately think, well, I'm a nation state, North Korea, China, whatever. It doesn't necessarily mean that. It can be simple ransomware. It can be misconfigured hardware. It can be an insider threat.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Safeguarding the Grid and the Plate: OT Insights with Aaron Crow, Host of PrOTect IT All Podcast
There's a lot of things, and it's not always bad actors from another country that are trying to attack us and start World War III. Some of them are, but not all of them.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Safeguarding the Grid and the Plate: OT Insights with Aaron Crow, Host of PrOTect IT All Podcast
Very cool. Well, and for your listeners that maybe don't know me, my name is Aaron Crow. I've been in cybersecurity and network security and this OT thing before it was ever called that. I grew up in working in critical manufacturing, power utility, a lot of those critical infrastructures. I actually do have some experience in the ag side as well. I'm from Texas.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Safeguarding the Grid and the Plate: OT Insights with Aaron Crow, Host of PrOTect IT All Podcast
So, you know, there's a lot of plants and things like that in this space from chicken plants and a lot of, you know, ranchers, et cetera. Right. So, you know, I've I also have a podcast, Protect It All, and emphasizing OT and IT. I do emphasize a lot of that in the OT space. But as we talk about this stuff, I had this conversation. This is, what, the 14th of August when we're recording this.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Safeguarding the Grid and the Plate: OT Insights with Aaron Crow, Host of PrOTect IT All Podcast
Well, and there's so many, again, we mentioned it, but there's 17 critical infrastructures. And the reason that they've been categorized as critical is because they're critical to human condition as Americans in our country. And if any one of those go down, it is going to impact our lives. All of our lives, not just yours, not just mine, but everyone's.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Safeguarding the Grid and the Plate: OT Insights with Aaron Crow, Host of PrOTect IT All Podcast
Like if the power goes down, you can't pump gas. You don't get water. You don't like everything tumbles down.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Safeguarding the Grid and the Plate: OT Insights with Aaron Crow, Host of PrOTect IT All Podcast
Don't even bother going. So the reason these things are critical is because really smart people sat in a room and they said, hey, what are the things that if they go down are going to impact society? Like the bigger society. So there's 17 of us. And I would argue, and I've worked in many of them, not all of them, but many of them.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Safeguarding the Grid and the Plate: OT Insights with Aaron Crow, Host of PrOTect IT All Podcast
And I would say almost all of them, at least the ones that I've been in, underfunded, people don't understand the risk, including the asset owners. And they don't have the right people and processes. And unfortunately, cyber is not... designed and engineered into the system. And it's an afterthought.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Safeguarding the Grid and the Plate: OT Insights with Aaron Crow, Host of PrOTect IT All Podcast
And unfortunately, usually an afterthought after something bad happens, like the example you just gave about the peanut, right? So they start looking at these systems when there's an attack, when there's a breakdown of physical or cyber incident. And then they have to because the spotlight is on them and they're required to. And then everybody else may be hopefully around them that are similar.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Safeguarding the Grid and the Plate: OT Insights with Aaron Crow, Host of PrOTect IT All Podcast
Say, oh, it happened to them. It could happen to us. We should we should look at that, too. Or there's regulation that comes down. So unfortunately, that's where we sit a lot of times in this industry. And it's not because the companies are bad companies. These are some of the best people I've ever worked with. They want to do the right thing, but they are strung behind.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Safeguarding the Grid and the Plate: OT Insights with Aaron Crow, Host of PrOTect IT All Podcast
They can only do what makes them money. And unfortunately, cyber and all this stuff is not a revenue center. We're not creating revenue value. My power plant's not more efficient. I don't create more wheat because I put in cybersecurity. It's more almost like an insurance policy. And nobody likes paying for insurance. It's just like this, ugh.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Safeguarding the Grid and the Plate: OT Insights with Aaron Crow, Host of PrOTect IT All Podcast
And I just came back from Black Hat and DEF CON. And I had so many questions and I work in the ICS Village. I'm a volunteer in the ICS Village, which is a nonprofit. If you don't know about that, definitely check it out. ICS Village is great. They do a lot of training and nonprofit things to kind of spread the word for operational technology and the importance of it.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Safeguarding the Grid and the Plate: OT Insights with Aaron Crow, Host of PrOTect IT All Podcast
The one thing I'll say on that is you look back and we do have a couple of examples of that in America. And you go back to Katrina when we had the hurricane that came through in New Orleans. And we saw martial law in two or three days and people that were committing crimes and going at gunpoint. And these are not bad people. These are everyday people like you and me that are dying.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Safeguarding the Grid and the Plate: OT Insights with Aaron Crow, Host of PrOTect IT All Podcast
desperate because their family is starving. Their baby is starving. They don't have food. They don't have water. They don't have a way to evacuate. There were basic needs in our country. And that was with FEMA and with the National Guard and the amount of public services that we have. And it was one small area. Imagine that on a large scale. Imagine that across our country.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Safeguarding the Grid and the Plate: OT Insights with Aaron Crow, Host of PrOTect IT All Podcast
When we can't just, you know, rally the troops from all over their country to this one geographical area. Imagine if that was on the East Coast, in the center and on the West Coast all at the same time. It would be we wouldn't even recover as well as we did at Katrina. And we all agree that we didn't recover well then. Like it was really not our best time.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Safeguarding the Grid and the Plate: OT Insights with Aaron Crow, Host of PrOTect IT All Podcast
But a lot of the conversations I was having at DEF CON, I've got this really cool blinky light OT wall that's got a PLC and secure mode access and a firewall. And it's really just a conversation piece to help people understand and I got so many people, this is 2024. And there's so many people that came up to me and were like, what is this? So I said, oh, well, this is OT in a box. What's OT?
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Safeguarding the Grid and the Plate: OT Insights with Aaron Crow, Host of PrOTect IT All Podcast
Yep.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Safeguarding the Grid and the Plate: OT Insights with Aaron Crow, Host of PrOTect IT All Podcast
have so many because my family, I grew up in Texas and a lot of our celebration, all of our celebrations are really around food. My grandmother making food and whether it's fried chicken or whatever it is, I remember my grandfather having these big mounds. He was a very, very skinny person, grew up very poor. But as an adult, he just loved to eat. So it was always just this big mound of food.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Safeguarding the Grid and the Plate: OT Insights with Aaron Crow, Host of PrOTect IT All Podcast
We had more food than we could ever eat in a lifetime. Every time we got together, it was always around food. And that's the way The irony of what you just said, right, is that food memory. We all have those food memories. Now, maybe the food that we bring is different because of where I grew up or where you grew up or what country you're from or whatever.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Safeguarding the Grid and the Plate: OT Insights with Aaron Crow, Host of PrOTect IT All Podcast
But I think we all tie back to breaking bread together, right? And some of the best relationships, the best nights out at wherever, when I go out with my wife, the best meals that we've ever had. I think they would not be quite as good if they weren't with her. It's the company that you're with.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Safeguarding the Grid and the Plate: OT Insights with Aaron Crow, Host of PrOTect IT All Podcast
Yes, the food's great, but if you have great food and horrible companionship, all those things are linked together. So it's not going to be that great and memorable of a meal, but if you're with great
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Safeguarding the Grid and the Plate: OT Insights with Aaron Crow, Host of PrOTect IT All Podcast
the people that you're with are amazing, the food can be mediocre and it's gonna be the most memorable time that you have and you're gonna be like, oh yeah, we had this and it was a really good burger or cake or whatever the thing is because you're there together.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Safeguarding the Grid and the Plate: OT Insights with Aaron Crow, Host of PrOTect IT All Podcast
It's part of human nature that we have all of these things and that we tie it all around the campfire and cooking and eating food together. It goes back to the beginning of time.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Safeguarding the Grid and the Plate: OT Insights with Aaron Crow, Host of PrOTect IT All Podcast
And I'm like, oh, okay. Like we still, many of them, and I love the question. Like I'm very glad that they said, I don't know what that is. Like, or some of them were like, I've heard of it. I don't exactly know what it is. So it was great to just be able to have that conversation, explain it. And there was one gentleman that he was going for his PhD, his dissertation.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Safeguarding the Grid and the Plate: OT Insights with Aaron Crow, Host of PrOTect IT All Podcast
Margarine, a lot of margarine.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Safeguarding the Grid and the Plate: OT Insights with Aaron Crow, Host of PrOTect IT All Podcast
Oh, yes. Too much.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Safeguarding the Grid and the Plate: OT Insights with Aaron Crow, Host of PrOTect IT All Podcast
But even today, like my kid wins, you know, gets a trophy or whatever. We're celebrating with food. Like, let's get you ice cream. Let's celebrate with ice cream. Let's get you a cookie, like all those types of things. And we try not to go too much because, you know, we don't want them to be unhealthy. But at the same time, it's fun. It's memorable. They enjoy it.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Safeguarding the Grid and the Plate: OT Insights with Aaron Crow, Host of PrOTect IT All Podcast
Like we we get joy from this food and we take it for granted, especially in America, where we have unlimited amounts of food. If I want anything, I go to the grocery store and they have anything I want. You like curry, you know, Sushi, like you can literally go to your grocery store and get sushi. Is it the best? No, but it's pretty darn good.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Safeguarding the Grid and the Plate: OT Insights with Aaron Crow, Host of PrOTect IT All Podcast
Comparatively speaking, think about 200 years ago trying to get sushi in the middle of the country. Like it wouldn't have happened.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Safeguarding the Grid and the Plate: OT Insights with Aaron Crow, Host of PrOTect IT All Podcast
100%. Honestly, I think we should all put on the cape, right? I think it's everybody's duty to do your part in whatever small way that is, right? The people part of that is we all have a calling to do something and each person's little contribution in stopping and saying things and raising your hand and not just, oh, well, he's smarter than me. He's been here longer than me.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Safeguarding the Grid and the Plate: OT Insights with Aaron Crow, Host of PrOTect IT All Podcast
And he was he was writing this dissertation from an IT OT convergence. We hear that all the time. I know my face did the same thing when he said it. And we had this conversation. He's like, well, I think OT and IT have already converged. And I'm like, really? Like, explain that to me. He's like, well, the technology is the same. OK. I'm like, he goes, it all OT now all has IP.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Safeguarding the Grid and the Plate: OT Insights with Aaron Crow, Host of PrOTect IT All Podcast
I'm not going to say anything. No, raise your hand, like voice that concern, bring that thing up, you know, bring, you know, push that agenda or idea ahead because it matters. In the grand scheme of things, it takes us all to challenge, you know, evil prevails when good men do nothing, right? It's really that simple of we have to stand up and say, no, that's not okay.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Safeguarding the Grid and the Plate: OT Insights with Aaron Crow, Host of PrOTect IT All Podcast
Like we have to stand up, even when nobody else in the room is going to agree with you. I don't care. Stand up and say it.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Safeguarding the Grid and the Plate: OT Insights with Aaron Crow, Host of PrOTect IT All Podcast
Yep. And my biggest concern with the whole CrowdStrike issue is that I think from what I've seen, I think a lot, and from my experience, a lot of these folks are going to be pointing the finger at CrowdStrike as a company and looking at, hey, this is what you did wrong.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Safeguarding the Grid and the Plate: OT Insights with Aaron Crow, Host of PrOTect IT All Podcast
And I'm not saying there is no blame because in this, it's just like, you know, anything there's blame, there's plenty of blame to go around, but that's not going to solve anything. It At the end of the day, yes, there was a misconfiguration. They pushed out something.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Safeguarding the Grid and the Plate: OT Insights with Aaron Crow, Host of PrOTect IT All Podcast
But ultimately, the bigger problem was, is that these companies just randomly pushed it across their entire organization without testing. Like in an OT environment, especially in a power plant environment or any of these critical infrastructure, I would never just blind. I don't care if it's been tested 50 times before.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Safeguarding the Grid and the Plate: OT Insights with Aaron Crow, Host of PrOTect IT All Podcast
I'm going to push it to one system, make sure that it comes back up, and then I'll push it to a second one and make sure that one comes back up. And then I'll push it to a third one. It's a pain in the butt and it takes longer.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Safeguarding the Grid and the Plate: OT Insights with Aaron Crow, Host of PrOTect IT All Podcast
But it's what I'm going to do because I've seen the bad side of this for the past 20 years. This is not the first time I've gotten a blue screen because of an update. So I'm not going to get burned by that again. It won't be the last time either. It won't. And it's not CrowdStrike's fault.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Safeguarding the Grid and the Plate: OT Insights with Aaron Crow, Host of PrOTect IT All Podcast
Like, yes, this incident, it was caused by CrowdStrike, but it's not the bigger picture of the root cause analysis. If I did a root cause analysis on this, the issue, yes, that was the trigger, but that is not the root cause of the problem that caused this bigger issue.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Safeguarding the Grid and the Plate: OT Insights with Aaron Crow, Host of PrOTect IT All Podcast
So that means it's IT. And I'm like, oh, no, no. So I had a 30 minute conversation with this gentleman about why I feel that OT is different than IT. The technology is the same. Like we see VMware and network servers and switches and all that kind of stuff that we have seen in IT now in OT. But the difference is, is what we do with it and what it impacts, right? And the implementation of policies.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Safeguarding the Grid and the Plate: OT Insights with Aaron Crow, Host of PrOTect IT All Podcast
Well, I'll give I'll give a last story here. And it's very similar to that. You know, working in these places, operators have we do what's called operator rounds where they walk around with some kind of handheld. It could be a piece of paper or whatever. In this particular area, it was a it was a power plant and they were that we had RFID tags on equipment. So they would.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Safeguarding the Grid and the Plate: OT Insights with Aaron Crow, Host of PrOTect IT All Podcast
The operator would walk up and they would scan the RFID tag and it would pull up the operator round portion and it would be a valve or a gauge or something. And they would, you know, put in readings, you know, temperature, pressure, you know, vibration. They put hands on it. They talk about if there's anything, any oil leaking or if it's dirty or whatever the thing is for that.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Safeguarding the Grid and the Plate: OT Insights with Aaron Crow, Host of PrOTect IT All Podcast
And it could be, you know, 10 steps long or it could be 100 steps and it could take them all around the facility. And we started noticing as we were doing reviews of the operator round and the data, it just, the data didn't make sense. And we were trying to get better information to do tuning and all that kind of stuff. And it just didn't make sense.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Safeguarding the Grid and the Plate: OT Insights with Aaron Crow, Host of PrOTect IT All Podcast
And sometimes the numbers were like way off, like temperature would be 9 million. Like, yeah, I don't think so. So is that an error? Is that an operator error? Are they entering it wrong? Is a key sticking? Like what is going on there? So as I'm walking it and I'm doing this.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Safeguarding the Grid and the Plate: OT Insights with Aaron Crow, Host of PrOTect IT All Podcast
And so I've got this guy and we're doing around and we're walking and he's scanning and we're going through it and everything looks fine. And then at lunchtime, we go in the break room where all the operators hang out and they're in there playing dominoes. And as they're playing dominoes, one of the guys, he's like, oh, hang on.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Safeguarding the Grid and the Plate: OT Insights with Aaron Crow, Host of PrOTect IT All Podcast
And he leans back in his chair and right behind him, he's got the handheld in his hand. He leans back in his chair and he scans an RFID tag that's sitting on the wall. And he does something on his thing and he goes back to playing dominoes. And I was like, what did you just do? He's like, Oh man, I got to do a round right now, but I'm in the middle of the game.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Safeguarding the Grid and the Plate: OT Insights with Aaron Crow, Host of PrOTect IT All Podcast
I'm like, okay, what'd you just scan? He goes, oh, I made a copy of all the RFID tags that are out in the field. And I just scan them right here and I can do it right here from the lunchroom. So they had gone out of their way, gotten blank RFID tags, went through all the rounds and duplicated every RFID tag. And he knew how long it took him to get from one to the next.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Safeguarding the Grid and the Plate: OT Insights with Aaron Crow, Host of PrOTect IT All Podcast
And he was just randomly scanning them and putting in fake data.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Safeguarding the Grid and the Plate: OT Insights with Aaron Crow, Host of PrOTect IT All Podcast
i mean so so it goes back to your point of sometimes you don't need the rfid tag and the fancy thing to make it more efficient and know exactly when they're scanning sometimes you just need somebody to watch over and say hey that's not a good idea and those things had been there for a long time and nobody noticed nobody saw saw somebody it took me five minutes like i was in there for half a day and
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Safeguarding the Grid and the Plate: OT Insights with Aaron Crow, Host of PrOTect IT All Podcast
I can't just take an IT policy and push it into OT because it breaks stuff. It just doesn't work. And we've seen that and it doesn't matter the vertical. You're in agriculture, in power utility, in oil and gas, in wastewater. It doesn't work to push it down in that way because it breaks stuff. And it's just a different way. Like we just saw this CrowdStrike.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Safeguarding the Grid and the Plate: OT Insights with Aaron Crow, Host of PrOTect IT All Podcast
And I saw him scanning in the lunchroom and it was very obvious, but nobody ever checked. It's not the guy was a bad guy. He was just, everybody else had done it. He thought it was okay. He didn't understand. And it really came back to a people problem. And it wasn't that this was a bad person. He didn't understand the value of the round.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Safeguarding the Grid and the Plate: OT Insights with Aaron Crow, Host of PrOTect IT All Podcast
So when we started digging into it, it was like, dude, we've been putting fraudulent data in here forever because the system is broken and nobody says anything. So obviously you guys are not getting value from this. So it's a waste of our time. And that's really what it came down to is they thought it was a waste of time.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Safeguarding the Grid and the Plate: OT Insights with Aaron Crow, Host of PrOTect IT All Podcast
So why am I going to go walk out there for something you're not looking at anyways? I'm going to stay here and play my dominoes. And he wasn't wrong. And we were trying to fix the problem.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Safeguarding the Grid and the Plate: OT Insights with Aaron Crow, Host of PrOTect IT All Podcast
And the ultimate problem was explaining and fixing it so that we were looking at the value instead of just having them do medial tasks to make sure they weren't being lazy, which is what originally I think the thing was put in for. And it completely broke it and it blew it up. And we changed the policy all throughout the company because of that one incident that we found.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Safeguarding the Grid and the Plate: OT Insights with Aaron Crow, Host of PrOTect IT All Podcast
And he didn't get in trouble. In fact, I thanked him for letting me see it. And I asked for his help to help me build a better process that they would be part of and want to make it better.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Safeguarding the Grid and the Plate: OT Insights with Aaron Crow, Host of PrOTect IT All Podcast
Makes sense.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Safeguarding the Grid and the Plate: OT Insights with Aaron Crow, Host of PrOTect IT All Podcast
Exactly. Exactly. Having conversations like this. I love having conversations with people no matter what their experience level. If you're a student or, you know, you've been doing this for 30 years, there's always something to learn and great conversations to have. And that's why you and I do this. Like we want to spread this knowledge, not pretend that we know it all. We never I never claim it.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Safeguarding the Grid and the Plate: OT Insights with Aaron Crow, Host of PrOTect IT All Podcast
I talked about the CrowdStrike incident a thousand times this week. That's a great example of I should not be patching or pushing updates to my OT systems. Just, hey, send it all. I should be sending to one at a time so that I can test and make sure like, We should all have a testing plan. And it's not a CrowdStrike issue. It's a policy.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Safeguarding the Grid and the Plate: OT Insights with Aaron Crow, Host of PrOTect IT All Podcast
I've never heard you claim it. Like, no. Yeah. We just enjoy having these conversations and using our experience for good to hopefully make a difference and leave the space in a better place than where we started out.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Safeguarding the Grid and the Plate: OT Insights with Aaron Crow, Host of PrOTect IT All Podcast
Well, thanks again. It was a great conversation. I really appreciate it.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Safeguarding the Grid and the Plate: OT Insights with Aaron Crow, Host of PrOTect IT All Podcast
It's the people and process side of people, process and technology that are really the biggest difference in OT versus IT. So that was my long rant of who I am and what I do and why I'm so passionate about this thing that we talk about.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Safeguarding the Grid and the Plate: OT Insights with Aaron Crow, Host of PrOTect IT All Podcast
Well, and it's always been that way. Even back when I was an IT person, my first job in IT was like a desktop support. And, you know, our joke was always like, if we take the users away, my job would be easy, right?
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Safeguarding the Grid and the Plate: OT Insights with Aaron Crow, Host of PrOTect IT All Podcast
yeah because because i can make the technology work it's the people that cause my problems like they they're clicking on something you know this is way back in the day dating myself but you know the the old school desktops the big tower things and we would literally have people use the cd-rom as you know coffee cup holders and then their cd-rom tray would break off and you know we don't have cd-rom trays anymore or even cds for that matter um
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Safeguarding the Grid and the Plate: OT Insights with Aaron Crow, Host of PrOTect IT All Podcast
Yeah. And it's the same in any industry, right? But speaking of, so I know you spend time and a lot of time in the agriculture. Before we started recording, we kind of talked about how it doesn't get as much limelight as some of the other more popular, I guess is maybe not the right term, critical infrastructure, power utility, oil and gas, even wastewater and water. But
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Safeguarding the Grid and the Plate: OT Insights with Aaron Crow, Host of PrOTect IT All Podcast
There are 17 critical infrastructures in our country deemed by DHS and Department of Homeland Security. So why do you think, two things, why do you think that agriculture doesn't get the attention that it may deserve?
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Safeguarding the Grid and the Plate: OT Insights with Aaron Crow, Host of PrOTect IT All Podcast
And secondly, what are some of the common problems and maybe even unique problems that agriculture has in the space that we need to make sure that we're thinking about from an OT cybersecurity perspective?
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Safeguarding the Grid and the Plate: OT Insights with Aaron Crow, Host of PrOTect IT All Podcast
Awesome. Hey, thank you for joining me. Kristen, why don't you introduce yourself? Tell us who you are and what it is that you do.