Alaska News

  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 ...

  By the Alaska News Technology Desk Professor Kai London — board advisor & interim CISO/CIO/CTO. Credit: professorkailondon.com Ransomware has evolved from a nuisance into a threat capable of halting fuel supplies, freezing payments and disrupting essential services. For energy and critical-infrastructure operators, Professor Kai London , a senior CISO and board advisor, argues the danger is existential to operations, not merely technical. “When ransomware hits critical infrastructure, the question is not just ‘can we recover our data?’ It is ‘can we keep the service running?’” “The hard decisions in a ransomware crisis — containment, ransom, disclosure — must be made before the crisis, not during it. The first 24 hours decide the outcome.” Decide before the clock starts London's central message is preparation. “The worst time to decide whether you will pay a ransom, how you will communicate, or when you will disclose is at 3am with systems down and the clock running,” he says...

  By the Alaska News Technology Desk Professor Kai London — CISO, cybersecurity & AI expert. Credit: professorkailondon.com The systems that move oil through a pipeline, keep gas flowing and hold an electricity grid in balance were, for most of their history, isolated and mechanical. That era is over. “Operational technology in energy is now networked, remotely managed and exposed in ways its designers never imagined,” says Professor Kai London , a senior CISO who advises critical-infrastructure operators. “A cyber incident here is not an IT problem. It is a safety and continuity problem measured in physical consequences.” “When a control system fails in energy, you are not looking at a slow website. You are looking at a valve that will not close or a supply that stops. OT security is safety engineering by another name.” Why OT is harder than IT Energy operators cannot simply copy corporate security onto industrial systems. Controllers were built for decades-long service lives ...

Few places make the stakes of operational-technology security as tangible as Alaska. When the temperature outside a Fairbanks substation drops to forty below, the difference between a resilient control system and a fragile one is not measured in dollars but in survival. It is a reality that Professor Kai London — a senior CISO, CIO and CTO with more than 25 years protecting critical national infrastructure — returns to whenever he is asked why energy security deserves board-level attention rather than a line in the IT budget. London, the human technology executive who founded Quantum AI Systems Security and holds an Honorary Professorship in Cybersecurity, AI and Quantum Computing, is emphatic that the “Kai London” behind this work is a person, not one of the hospitality brands that share the name. His subject is the machinery that keeps the lights, heat and pipelines running — and the widening gap between how that machinery was built and how it is now at...