A coalition of cyber firms and critical infrastructure operators on Tuesday spelled out its views on the tasks that the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency should assign federal agencies to protect operational technology systems after this summer’s attacks on water utilities.

The Operational Technology Cybersecurity Coalition said a CISA binding operational directive (BOD) for OT should specify who is responsible for protecting these systems at each agency,, draw on existing federal guidelines and set minimum cybersecurity practices.

The coalition said the BOD would address a need to act based on CISA’s lack of visibility into the spectrum of OT devices in federal agencies, a lack of consistent across-the-board OT security policies and the severity of the consequences that an attack on federal OT could produce.

Just last month, the Government Accountability Office published a report which concluded that most federal civilian executive branch agencies (FCEBs) haven’t enacted Office of Management and Budget requirements released in 2023 for networked Internet of Things and OT devices.

Putting forward recommendations for a CISA directive has two goals, said Michael Garcia, policy director of the coalition.

“One, it does make sure that the government is taking its own medicine,” said Garcia, who until recently worked at the agency. “You should practice what you preach. … Second, it sends a very strong signal to the private sector that, ‘This is what we think is important: As an OT partner, owner or operator or critical infrastructure owner or operator, [this is what] you should ask other providers to do.’”

There are 8,000 General Services Administration-owned and -leased properties, many of which would have OT involved in everything from power supply to heating, ventilation and air conditioning systems. Some of those OT systems might be “trivial,” Garcia acknowledged, but the coalition paper notes that CISA “does not currently have a holistic view of the assets managed by the FCEB and the potential risks, such as connected programmable logic controllers, to which the government may be exposed.”

With OT falling into a “government gray zone” between chief information officers and facilities managers, CISA should tell agencies to formally designate an officer in charge of cybersecurity for OT, the coalition recommends.

The directive should examine past OT guidelines the National Security Agency issued to see if they should apply to federal civilian agencies, and align any requirements in the hypothetical BOD with cybersecurity performance goals that CISA first issued in 2022, according to the coalition.

The coalition doesn’t assert that such a BOD would have headed off the attacks this summer on the water sector, and is focused on federal OT, something where CISA has done some work.

“To be fair, CISA has incorporated OT security requirements into prior directives (such as BODs 23-01, 23-02, and 26-04) alongside a host of technical guidance,” the paper reads. “But as AI reduces the technical barriers to sophisticated cyber operations, enabling adversaries to identify weaknesses, accelerate reconnaissance, and move laterally through poorly segmented operational environments with greater speed and scale, it is time for an encompassing BOD solely focused on OT security.”

CISA didn’t respond to a request for comment Monday in advance of the coalition publishing its paper.

But Garcia said that in discussions with CISA, “increasingly, I think they understand that there might be a need” for an OT BOD.

The post Here’s how experts think CISA should tell agencies to protect OT appeared first on CyberScoop.

Citrix customers just got through back-to-back weekends filled with varying levels of uncertainty and worry, as yet another actively exploited zero-day vulnerability was discovered in Citrix NetScaler products.

Researchers and security experts said the vulnerability — CVE-2026-88779 — is less concerning because exploitation triggers denial of service and only impacts instances that have SAML (security assertion markup language) enabled. 

“This means it doesn’t work out of the box against every NetScaler deployment,” Jake Knott, head of threat intelligence at watchTowr, told CyberScoop. “While this is very inconvenient, it doesn’t have organizations scrambling to trigger incident response.”

Citrix was much quicker and consistent in alerting customers to the emerging threat Friday, and followed up the next day with a more detailed blog post and security advisory that contained a patch for the high-severity defect. 

“After we were alerted to this issue we immediately developed and published a mitigation while concurrently developing, testing and deploying a fix,” a company spokesperson said in a statement. “The fix for this issue is available, and we urge all customers to quickly apply it to their NetScaler instance.”

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency added the defect to its known exploited vulnerabilities catalog Sunday.

The vendor’s response also provided some relief for customers and researchers who spent much of the previous weekend rushing to assess widespread rumors of other defects in the assailed network edge gateways. In that case, Citrix took most of the weekend to confirm attackers were actively exploiting a pair of NetScaler zero-days, some of which researchers said remained undetected for at least three weeks.

“Citrix did a better job with their response to this vulnerability,” and took steps that enabled customers to make their own risk-based decisions with more currently available information, said Joe Toomey, vice president of underwriting security at insurance provider Coalition. 

“Although it’s difficult to celebrate given this is the third publicly-exploited NetScaler zero-day vulnerability in a two-week window, it is a step in the right direction,” he added. 

Citrix declined to say how many customers are impacted by the latest zero-day or when the first instance of exploitation occurred. Yet, Knott at watchTowr said exploitation likely began Friday. 

The newer defect doesn’t share any technical links with the pair of zero-days Citrix disclosed less than a week prior, but it can accelerate one of those vulnerabilities — CVE-2026-88771 — by intentionally crashing machines to speed up exploitation, Knott said.

While risk is currently perceived low for CVE-2026-88779, it is “incredibly simple to trigger, with a single specially crafted request being all that is needed to knock an appliance offline,” Knott added. “Exploitation is already occurring in the wild, and disrupting an authentication gateway can prevent legitimate users from accessing the services behind it.”

Toomey also described the denial-of-service vulnerability as less serious than the previous week’s actively exploited zero-days. Yet, he noted, exploitation attempts of CVE-2026-88779 “clearly contain shellcode that implies that the threat actor believes they can use this vulnerability, or chain it with another vulnerability, in order to achieve remote-code execution.”

The post Citrix discloses third actively exploited NetScaler zero-day in less than a week appeared first on CyberScoop.