The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) this week kicked off a 100-day plan whose goal is to improve the cybersecurity of electric utilities — specifically their industrial control systems (ICS) — and secure the energy sector supply chain.
The DOE, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and the electricity industry are working together on this initiative, which focuses on encouraging the implementation of enhanced cybersecurity capabilities.
The DOE has also released a request for information (RFI), seeking input from academic, private and public stakeholders in the energy industry on recommendations for improving supply chain security.
SecurityWeek has reached out to several industry professionals for their thoughts on this new initiative.
Ron Brash, Director, Cybersecurity Insights, Verve Industrial:
“Within the 100-day sprint – what can truly be accomplished with such a monolithic lift? What does the Biden administration mean by increased visibility? Adding more sensors? Getting a more accurate and comprehensive catalog of assets and their logical assets contained within? Or is this a knee jerk response to the Texas outage combined with alleged implants in Chinese transformers and the geopolitical tensions that likely look similar through a reverse lens?
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Now if we are talking about what can be done in the next 100 days – who are we talking about? Are we talking about the fortune 500 energy companies within the US or the smaller organizations that likely are the ones needing real help? Or are we talking about a collaboration with the Canadians providing a ton of excess hydro-electric power to the West & East coasts? Regardless of who we are talking about, or the unansw ..
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