Dr Mani Swaminathan
Unit WG11-CRITIS principle , German Federal Office for Security in Information Technology ( BSI )
Mani Swaminathan holds a Master ’ s degree in Telecommunications from the Indian Institute of Technology , Delhi and a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Oldenburg , Germany . He has held positions in industry and academia in India , Switzerland , and Germany including General Electric Global Research , the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne , the University of Oldenburg , the Forschungszentrum Julich , and the German Aerospace Center . He joined the BSI in August 2019 and is reponsible among others for coordinating activities related to international cooperation in Critical Information Infrastructure Protection .
" Protection of Critical Infrastrures in Germany : CyberSecurity in the fuel oil industry "
The focus of our presentation is the situation report as of 2019 with regard to cybersecurity in the fuel oil industry , which falls under the Energy Sector , regulated in Germany as an Essential Service according to the BSI Act ( BSIG ) in conjunction with the BSI-Kritis Ordinance ( BSI-KritisV ). This regulation requires Operators of Essential Services to immediately report cybersecurity incidents to the BSI as the National Competent Authority . An evaluation of such incident reports from the year 2019 indicate that cybersecurity incidents in the fuel oil industry often result from loopholes in the technical infrastructures of the facilities , broadly classifiable into the following categories :
- absence of separation of concerns resulting from the absence of network segmentation , where the provision of the essential service ( fuel oil supply in this case ) could be affected owing to " non-essential " parts of the network being compromised , and - error-prone administration of user authentication , resulting in user access controls being compromised .
We begin the presentation with an overview of the legal framework of the BSIG and BSI-KritisV , before moving on to the situation report as of 2019 for the fuel oil industry , and conclude with measures for mitigating the loopholes listed above .