Uncharacteristic winter weather recently sent the Texas power grid into overdrive, resulting in mass outages. Unfortunately, inclement weather isn’t the only threat facing utility companies: Cyber threats have the potential to impact the power grid in a similarly serious manner. The pandemic has compounded existing risks, driving utilities’ digital transformation at a much faster pace, effectively widening attack surfaces and exposing the risks associated with integrating operations technology with information technology.
With remote work and distributed networks here to stay, both utilities and government regulators must shift their cybersecurity focus. Here are two important considerations utility companies should keep in mind when building an active defense to help secure the electric grid.
New Guidelines Recommend a Little Trickery
Utilities seeking ways to reinforce their defenses can start by reviewing helpful resources like MITRE ATT&CK and MITRE Shield, both freely available knowledge bases that help defenders better understand the adversaries they face and what defenses they should put in place to counter them. Utility companies may not be able to prevent every adversary from getting into the system, but these MITRE programs can help them better prepare for attacks in the future.
One area that MITRE has increasingly focused on includes cyber deception and denial technology, which are increasingly being adopted to detect lateral movement within the network. Deception can identify unauthorized activity during attacker discovery, lateral movement and privilege escalation, luring them away from valuable assets with decoys designed to look like real network objects. A hydroelectric system might put a decoy structure in place with fake programmable logic indistinguishable from the real thing. An attacker who tries to tamper ..
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