Siemens, over the last several months, has worked closely with the National Cybersecurity Center of Excellence (NCCoE) at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) on a cybersecurity project for the energy sector.
The NCCoE is a collaborative hub where industry organizations, government agencies, and academic institutions work together to address businesses’ most pressing cybersecurity challenges.
“Collaborating with stakeholders such as members of industry, technology providers, and integrators to produce viable cybersecurity solutions is key to the NCCoE’s success,” said Jim McCarthy, NCCoE senior security engineer. “The Situational Awareness practice guide is another successful example of how these stakeholders engage with NCCoE to produce solutions to real word problems that can be adopted to reduce the level of risk for owners and operators in the Energy Sector.”
The NCCoE released a draft practice guide of this cybersecurity project, titled NIST SP 1800-7 Situational Awareness for Electric Utilities. The guide explores the methods utilities can use to more readily detect and remediate anomalous conditions, investigate the chain of events that led to the anomalies, and share findings with other energy companies. NCCoE partnered with Siemens, along with other technology vendors, to collect and converge monitoring information across these silos by using their commercially available, open-source products.
“Siemens RuggedCom contributed to the NCCoE practice guide by providing utilities information to help the companies implement a secure infrastructure and communication network while enabling the utility to be aware of their environment and devices within their substations with the RuggedCom RX1500, RX1400 and Crossbow,” said Jeff Foley, senior business development manager, Siemens RuggedCom.
The draft, available for download on the NCCoE website, maps security characteristics to guidance and best practices from NIST and other standards organizations. This practice guide can help energy companies reduce their risk by showing how commercially available technologies, like RuggedCom,* can be used to alert their staff to potential or actual cyber attacks directed at the grid. The NCCoE and we think the guide helps meet a critical cybersecurity need, but we’d like to hear from you.
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