How vulnerable is our National Electric Infrastructure? The Grid. This was the topic of a live presentation hosted by the Bipartisan Policy Organization on August 8,2013 in Washington DC. The title of the presentation was “Protecting the Electric Grid from Cyber Hacking’ and included a Who’s Who of participants including:
General Hayden – Former NSA Director
Curt Hobart – Former Exec VP of Entergy
Ed Goetz – Excelon
Doug Meyers – Pepco Holdings
Scott Saunders – Sacramento Municipal District
Scott Aronson – Edison Electric
Michael Smith – DOE
Larry Zelvin – Homeland Security
Mathew Blizard – NIRC
Scanning the guest list gives you a good idea of the breadth of the organization required to secure our electric grid. Its a shared responsibility between business and government to secure an asset that will always have the “least amount of defense because of our Founding fathers”…..Think about it…..
Why are we vulnerable?
We created “this internet” that everyone, everything is connected to. If we were to ask Vince Cerf, one of the Internet founders, what the SOW (statement of Work) was he would probably say something like this:
Build it quickly, easily with a limited number of nodes who all TRUST each other. Security was not part of the equation.
Fast forward to today and you have multiple layers of sinners:
Layer 1 – Stealing stuff
Layer 2 – Disrupting networks
Layer 3 – Disrupting underlying “critical infrastructure”
Who are these sinners
1. Nation States like China and Iran
2. Criminal Elements
3. Anarchists like ??Anonymous??
And its going to get worse before it gets better. There is constant reconnaissance of our network and it must be assumed that there are “sinners” living on our network undetected and waiting.
So what do we do? What is our defense?
Tools, of which there are many, are an interesting part of the solution. A more benign and equally if not more effective is network hygiene.
1. Passwords
2. Patching
3. Knowing the network architecture
Our laws may also need updating to allow for information sharing between businesses, business and government and between other nations – for example Mexico and Canada.
Security of the Electric Grid is of a National Interest and needs all of us to keep it protected.
SEE SOMETHING……………..SAY SOMETHING.
STOP———————-THINK————————–CONNECT