IT security in energy sector to come under scrutiny
IT security in energy sector to come under scrutiny:
Officials from the House Committee on Government Reform want to study the security of the national power grid’s cyber-based control systems. The concern is that an equally devastating series of failures could be triggered by relatively minor disruptions to the control systems that manage the power grid.
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The issue came to the forefront during the California energy crisis in 2001. For 17 days, between 25 April and 11 May, hackers managed to remain undetected after they breached the network of the California Independent System Operator (ISO), which manages that state’s electric grid. Although no damage was reported, officials traced the intrusion back to a system in China.
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The problem, however, is that electrical grids such as California ISOs are highly integrated and dependent on other regional grids, and all are managed using technology known as Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) systems. Once highly proprietary, SCADA systems are, increasingly, being deployed using commercial off-the-shelf technologies that rely on public internet protocols and connections for ease of management and cost savings, experts said.
