Brandon Dunlap, Brightfly’s Managing Director of Research, was quoted in eWeek’s “GridGate” article series on security issues within the US electric grid today. Drawing upon his experience in the utility sector, he provided advice to his friends and colleagues still working within it.
“To Dunlap, energy companies need to look at three key areas to improve their overall security. The first involves more sharing of ideas between plant operations and IT or information security. Another is tighter integration between physical security, information security, IT, plant operations and other groups as more technology is pushed down to the meter level. Finally, he said, companies need to do more than merely meet the minimum regulatory requirements that do exist.”
These barriers to efficient and effective operations are not new to any one working in this field, regardless of vertical and are key points that Brightfly has promoted for a long time.
In a sort of “call to arms”, Dunlap encouraged utilities to strive for more open dialogue and information sharing, not only with one another, but also with vendors.
“Reach out to your peers in other companies, share ideas. Push your vendors to incorporate security into their control systems, band together for a stronger voice if you can. I have sat in on a lot of conference calls with various utilities and there seems to be a certain air of defensiveness among many of the members. They seem reluctant to share beyond a certain point. We need more collaboration.”
This aggregated “voice of the customer” is growing louder and we have been fortunate to work with some vendor companies leading the charge to integrate security elements into their control system technologies. Unfortunately, too often the necessary updates to maintain the security solutions outpaces the revision cycles of the underlying control systems, creating a gap in supportability for the overall system. By working as a coherent team, utilities are more likely to get the necessary security “baked into” their control systems. But we’ll have to wait until the next buying cycle for such things to find out if the message has truely taken hold.
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