"The Cybersecurity Threat Landscape Has Changed," Says Chair of DNP Technical Committee
SINGAPORE, Nov. 22, 2011 /PRNewswire-Asia/ -- SCADA Asia 2012, the annual gathering of control and automation engineers, IT experts and security experts will take place from the 10th to the 13th of January, 2012 in Hong Kong.
Andrew West, Chair of DNP Technical Committee will present on the security considerations for automation systems at the conference and is also running a workshop on the IEC 61850 standards.
The Stuxnet incident has had an impact on the communities＊ understanding of the cybersecurity threat landscape according to Andrew West, the Chair of DNP Technical Committee.
Andrew West comments: "I think the biggest shift in the past 12 months in the SCADA sector is the effect that the emergence of Stuxnet has had on people's understanding of the cybersecurity threat landscape. Previously it was generally believed that while systems were not very secure, there was still a need for too much specialist knowledge for there to be any credible threat. Stuxnet showed that there can be very sophisticated and well-targeted attacks and that there are people who are motivated to carry them out. It was also the first piece of malware (that I know of) that was targeted specifically and directly at a piece of plant control hardware and at a specific process."
Andrew also has an interesting take on the smart grid buzz.
"Another big change I have seen is the shift in focus away from the "Smart Grid" technologies, possibly because we are now past the initial hype, the real work has just begun and there is nothing "newsworthy" until someone actually completes something and shows a worthwhile result."
Bridging the gap between what standards specify and what is practically implemented is the key.
Andrew then adds "As for standards: I have seen good work done by people to understand how to use IEC 61850 safely (and this is not trivial). The entire concept of developing profiles to bridge the gap between the information that can be (or is) covered in standards and what is required for real implementations is not always well understood."
Andrew West joins the likes of Dr. Peter Fuhr(U.S. Department of Energy), Jim Baker (Water Corporation of Western Australia), Ricky Hung(CLP Power), Paul Ulat(CBK Power), Abdullah Alkalifah(Saudi Aramco), Ravi Malik(Origin Energy) and many other experts in Hong Kong the coming January.
Visit www.scadasummit.com for more details or email [email protected] for more information.
Single point of failure, user moblie phones.