About author

Marina Krotofil is a cyber security professional with over a decade of hands-on experience in securing Industrial Control Systems (ICS) and Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT). 

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Born in Poltava, Ukraine, Marina showed an early interest in reading and numbers. She graduated from specialized school majoring in physics and mathematics and received a scholarship for the prestigious Kharkiv National University of Radio Electronics, where she received  a BSc. and MSc. in Telecommunications. Her first computer Marina assembled herself from the parts and quickly learned how to defend it from the pesky attacks coming from the wide-area students' network. While working as a telecommunications engineer at Velton Telecom, she additionally set up her own small company to assist with intricate network troubleshooting issues and incident response. Often she had to infect her very own computer to learn how to remediate it without reinstalling the OS and major applications - a requirement for remediation of complex retail and banking environments.

 

To progress with her professional career, Marina moved to Germany where she received a scholarship from Airbus for a Double Master’s degree program at TUHH and NIT. During her German degrees, she worked on multiple applied projects at the Airbus and academia (TUHH and IIT Bombay) which first introduced her to the notion of causing physical damage with attacks executed over digital networks. She managed to receive a Research Associate position under Prof. Dieter Gollmann at TUHH where she focused on teaching security subjects and on applied research in the cyber-physical security domain. During her research, she collaborated with organizations like ABB Research, Shell, and Compass Security as well as the leading experts in her research area Jason Larsen and Prof. Alvaro Cardenas. Her early project work at Shell refineries gave her invaluable insights into factors critical to the success of attacks aimed at physical impact. In 2015 she presented her first version of the cyber-physical attack lifecycle at Black Hat USA. This work was very well received by the community and paved the path for further research on the topic of cyber-physical exploitation. Marina continued her professional career in the industry where she applied her skills and knowledge of adversarial tactics to securing industrial environments. 

Throughout her career, Marina managed and executed diverse technical projects around the world across a variety of industrial domains in North America, Europe and  the Middle East. She is also an experienced Red/Blue Teamer who researched numerous novel attack vectors, and exploitation techniques, designed novel defense methods, and led complex incident responses. Marina frequently collaborates with international organizations on the topics of critical infrastructure security. She is a regular speaker at the leading conference stages worldwide and is a frequent reviewer of academic manuscripts and grant proposals, she also leads Cyber-Physical Systems & IoT track at Black Hat.