What does a 30-year-old timekeeping protocol have to do with taking down a phone network?
In this episode of the mnemonic security podcast, Robby welcomes OT security specialist Mikael Vingaard back to the podcast to share some war stories from the world of industrial security.
They start off talking about the Network Time Protocol (NTP), a decades-old protocol that still plays a fundamental role in keeping systems synchronised. Mikael shares the story of how renting three servers in Albania accidentally made him one of the country's main sources of NTP traffic, and how shutting them down disrupted an ISP's IP telephony. They discuss what the story reveals about dependencies we may not even know exist, and what incorrect time can mean for industrial systems.
They also explore configuration drift in OT environments, where small and often undocumented changes accumulate over long device lifecycles. Mikael shares findings from passive network assessments, including supposedly air-gapped networks that turned out to be connected and discusses how periodic verification can help organisations understand what is actually running in their environments.
Finally, they discuss approaches to securely scanning OT environments, testing guardrails around AI and Denmark's push for digital sovereignty.
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