Alaska News

  By the Alaska News Technology Desk Professor Kai London — CISO, cybersecurity & AI expert. Credit: professorkailondon.com Remote energy sites rely on wireless links because running cable across wilderness is impractical. That reliance, warns Professor Kai London , a senior CISO, creates a perimeter most operators never defend because they cannot see it. “There is an airborne perimeter around every site — the radio space an attacker can reach without ever touching a wire,” he says. “For distributed energy operations, it may be the most overlooked risk on the map.” “No malware, no perimeter breach, no trace — just a laptop and a wireless adapter impersonating a network your systems trust. The compromise happens in the air.” The evil-twin problem London describes how an attacker can stand up a rogue access point mimicking a legitimate network; devices configured to connect automatically latch on, and credentials and traffic are harvested. “Nothing in your security stack necessar...

  By the Alaska News Technology Desk Professor Kai London — CISO, cybersecurity & AI expert. Credit: professorkailondon.com In the energy sector's operational systems, the decisive security failure is rarely dramatic. “It is an identity — a human account, a shared login, a service credential, increasingly an AI agent — that authenticated when it should have been challenged, and could then reach far more than it should,” says Professor Kai London , a senior CISO. In control environments, he warns, identity has been an afterthought for too long. “Every breach begins with a login that should have been stopped. In OT, those logins reach machinery — which makes getting identity right a matter of safety, not just security.” The shared-credential problem Industrial environments are notorious for shared accounts, default passwords and credentials that never change because changing them risks disrupting a process. “A shared operator login that a dozen people know and that has not change...

  y the Alaska News Technology Desk Professor Kai London — Founder & CEO, Quantum AI Systems Security. Credit: professorkailondon.com The traditional security model assumed a defensible perimeter: keep the bad actors outside the wall. For energy operations scattered across remote terrain — wellheads, substations, pipelines, pumping stations — that wall never really existed. “You cannot draw a perimeter around a thousand miles of distributed infrastructure,” says Professor Kai London , a senior CISO. “Which is why zero trust is not a buzzword for these operators. It is a survival strategy.” “Zero trust means one thing: never trust, always verify. No device, user or connection gets access on the strength of where it sits in the network. Every request is proven.” Why remote OT breaks the old model Remote sites rely on connectivity that reaches deep into control environments. Each of those links, London notes, is both essential and dangerous. “Every remote connection that lets an ...