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“Grid cybersecurity is one of the critical frontiers in the security of the U.S. infrastructure system,” King said.
The conference will be held Sept. 26-29, 2016 at
Salve Regina University in Newport, RI. “In this scholarly setting the
industry can learn best practices; cybersecurity vendors and others can
get down to granular issues that aren’t easily discussed in the office
setting,” Spencer said.
The
“Newport Conference” will bring together utility IT officers, managers,
first responder teams as well as vendors of firewalls, alarms and other
security systems for utilities.
“The
utility industry is undergoing great changes in its structure. It is
being reshaped by disruptive technologies, environmental pressures and
social expectations.
“More
and more, the old grid is giving way to the new grid in a
sophisticated, computer-dominated world where the enemy could be in any
line of code, any weak link in the industry,” Spencer said.
King
added: “The first goal of modern warfare is to take out the electrical
supply, and the rest follows from there. As a result, those who wish to
do harm to a country — and to the United States, in particular — are
aware that without electricity, a great nation is paralyzed.”
He
said that he saw the precursor to this kind of havoc back in 1965, when
most of the Northeast went dark. That was incredible but today, with
more reliance on electricity throughout the life of the nation, things
would be even worse.
King
and Spencer said enemies, both state and non-state (like ISIS), are
hard at work probing our cyber-defenses, seeking weakness and waiting to
strike.
“We
want to advance the understanding of the threat as well as to ensure
that the best practices in cybersecurity are being followed as the grid
itself changes into something new and even more electronically
interconnected than in the past,” they said.
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