14 DAY TRIAL // Cisco has folded their Critical Infrastructure Assurance Group, but this doesn't mean that the company will no longer continue their research. It was all a part of restructuring the company, but this has not yet been publicly announced. However, Dark Reading found out about this and even displayed a statement on their website:
"CIAG as a whole still exists and remains an integral part of the company," a Cisco spokesperson said earlier. "Cisco continually reviews its operations as a normal course of business to achieve the greatest focus on growth opportunities, customer satisfaction, and productivity gains. As this occurs, we evaluate resources to ensure that they are aligned with the highest priority work that addresses our customers' needs."
The CIAG was dealing in improving security of the global critical infrastructure. Their job was to help companies worldwide in implementing security strategies by directly addressing research, training, education, sound practices and standard needs. Those researchers aren't being kicked out of the company; it's all about changing roles.
However, Dale Peterson (founder and director of the SCADA Security Practice at Digital Bond) said in one of his recent blog posts that some of the CIAG researchers are now looking for SCADA security work. He wrote: "If you haven't heard from Cisco's Critical Infrastructure Assurance Group (CIAG) it is because this group has been disbanded in a corporate restructuring. CIAG is the group that Matt Franz, Darrin Miller, Andrew Wright and others worked in and provided research and assistance with AGA12, Modbus Firewall, SMART, SAFE, CVSS, and so on. Some of these researchers are looking for SCADA security work. This is not a huge surprise because Cisco never cared or did much with the results from this group, likely because the control system market is too small for Cisco."
Here is CIAG's website, as part of the Cisco page, if you want to get more info on the group.