In Intel and McAfee have announced a partnership to better protect the worlds energy utility ecosystem, including generation, transmission and distribution, from increased cyber attacks.
The duo has provided a blueprint for a comprehensive solution of multiple products that create layers of security and operate together without great complexity or without impacting availability. McAfee and Intel solutions deliver a variety of technologies for securing the energy environments, decreasing chances of malicious attacks, increasing uptime and decreasing resource intensive responses to fix and update systems.
As a jointly created reference implementation that mirrors real-world energy environments customers can see the technology implemented fully and integrated across endpoint, network and cloud. The solution is focused on satisfying the energy industries need for situational awareness, seamless multi-zone protection, native supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) support, and remote device management.
Challenges Facing Energy Infrastructure
The complexity and diversity of the electrical power delivery systems make protecting them from cyber attacks very difficult. Energy providers infrastructure is comprised of a diverse set of networks that cannot be effectively secured by simply adding technologies designed for typical enterprise IT environments. Many of the power grids aging assets predate the internet revolution and are particularly vulnerable from attack and unable to identify or report malicious activity up the network chain. Substations, known as one of the most vulnerable parts of the smart grid, are particularly at risk from attack. Meanwhile, hackers have grown more sophisticated, increasing the need to defuse or deter zero-day and more sophisticated attacks.
Securing electric power delivery is an enormous task because of:
- Multiple zones include: Corporate IT, SCADA, and device networks: Each different zone has unique technical challenges.
- Coping with big data overload: Security devices on the network produce incredibly large number of logs, overwhelming stretched IT departments.
- Simplifying endpoint manageability and improving visibility: Energy endpoints are spread geographically and rarely updated and many times lack the ability to detect or communicate and identify a security breach. Device failures can be costly especially when they require updates if not properly managed.
- Providing the right security context for the grid: Standard IT products dont have the right features to identify issues within the energy infrastructure or dont understand the unique utility lexicon making it difficult to apply specialized measures need for control systems.
"To adequately secure critical systems against cyber attacks, the right products and technologies must be integrated into the entire infrastructurefrom the enterprise, to the SCADA and control systems, and even to the automated device networkswithout impacting reliability or interfering with operations, said Eric Knapp, critical infrastructure expert at McAfee. Together, Intel and McAfee have combined commercially-available chipset capabilities and cyber security products into the perfect recipe for substation security, providing advanced protection while removing operational complexity, and improving reliability through remote manageability."
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