Grid's Cyber-Security Part (III)

Creating a Security Strategy

Creating a security strategy requires two important steps:

• Knowing your Vulnerabilities

• Knowing potential resolution to those vulnerabilities

Following is a presentation of both these aspects with a brief description:

Simply put, all generation, transmission and distribution systems could have technical and non-technical vulnerabilities caused deliberately or spontaneously. These vulnerabilities could pose high, moderate or low levels of threat to systems' integrity. Resolving such threats would require measures at each level to maintain systems' integrity, such that the systems function as desired.

Cost Assessment of Risk:

Assessing where the risk lies in the systems and how much would their impact be, is again one concept, that is essential before placing technology to prevent the damage that could occur. Since, the risks in the red zone require more investments and those in the green zone could be prevented by just reinforcing current systems. Hence, it is essential to do the Cost benefit Analysis of threats posing long-lasting and short-term risks.

Here to analyze the benefit of using a method to resolve the risks posed by a threat has been calculated as the difference between cost the the risk poses and the cost of method of resolution of that risk. Following is a very simplified example of the same:

Next in Line:

• Vulnerability Testing

• Cloud Threat Detection

• Secure Channels (VPN)

• End Point Security

• Physical Updates

• Learning Security Systems (AI ML based Systems)