Tripwire & NCCoE Collaborate on the Energy Sector Asset Management Project
Eight companies including Tripwire have been selected by the National Cybersecurity Center of Excellence (NCCoE) to collaborate on the Energy Sector Asset Management Project.
The NCCoE is a part of the National Institute of Standards and Technology. These companies are working together to build a reference design and an example solution that can be used by energy companies to help identify, control and monitor their operational technology (OT) assets. The reference design and example solution are intended to demonstrate how cybersecurity best practices and standards along with today’s commercially available technologies, can produce an easily adaptable cybersecurity solution.
In the last few years, a spotlight has been thrown on the security of energy networks by recent cyber-attacks. Profit-motivated hackers and politically minded state sponsored organizations have become increasingly active during the period. In 2015, three power distribution companies in Ukraine were simultaneously compromised in the first known attack on an electrical grid to generate a blackout. The “Crash Override” malware attack left 230,000 people without power for up to 6 hours. The sophisticated coordination of the attack suggested that a state actor was behind it. One year later, an advanced version of the malware was used to attack Kiev’s power grid. Twenty percent of Kiev’s power was blacked out in this incident. It is widely believed that Russia was using attacks on the Ukraine as a way of testing its cyber-warfare expertise.
Additional attacks have occurred since then in Israel, Germany, France, Denmark, UK and the United States. Hackers looking for profit have repeatedly deployed ransomware, for example. At the same time, state actors including Iran and North Korea have penetrated into power companies and their control systems.
In the most recent event in March 2018, the U.S. FBI and the DHS issued a warning (Read more...)
*** This is a Security Bloggers Network syndicated blog from The State of Security authored by Stephen Wood. Read the original post at: https://www.tripwire.com/state-of-security/ics-security/tripwire-nccoe-energy-sector-project/