This past week was the National Electric Sector Cybersecurity Organization Resource (NESCOR) Summit in Washington, DC. It was a useful and productive session and seemed to achieve the goals laid out.
Erfan Ibrahim from EPRI set the stage, we broke into working groups to dig deeper into three major subtopics and then came back to one room to tie it all together.
My favorite part was an impromptu panel with Justin Searle of InGuardians, Andrew Wright from N-Dimension and myself at the end (“would I like a stage and a microphone?” are you kidding?). Very good discourse and it was definitely informed by the work of preceding days.
The working groups are continuing and evolving to identify and dig into issues, outputting tangible deliverables to assist DoE and other organizations’ decision making.
In May my colleague Guillermo Grande attended an ISA event in Madrid where CNPIC is following a similar path of engaging pertinent parties, setting up working groups and grinding through the problem of industrial control system security.
Watching the various engines of civil society warm up and set to addressing the daunting task of critical infrastructure cybersecurity is very interesting, like an episode of Build it Bigger. Some would say it is also very depressing or even very frightening.
I would disagree with those folks.
(crossposted from Infosec Island)