Cyber Threats To Energy Sector Of America

The energy sector has been one of the crucial sectors of America. The article mentioned discusses on cyber threats to pipelines which are the backbone of the energy sector. Approximately 34% of the nation’s electricity is generated by natural gas-powered electricity plants. If there is even the smallest cyber-attack, It can pose a major effect on the energy sector and thus affecting thousands of interconnected digital systems disrupting people’s lives. These interruptions could take several days to months to recover and could cause significant damage to people, property, or the environment and involve huge costs to fix it.

Defense in depth can help to minimize cyber threat vulnerability. Following are the types of threats that could impact our economy. They are insider threats, natural hazard disruption, physical attacks, counterfeits, supply chain attacks, and tampering. The attacks have increased pertaining to a fact that there is widespread automation and artificial intelligence in place instead of manual tasks. External Control and IT systems along with Internal policy and Procedures helping the companies to Identify, Protect, Detect, respond and recover from cyber threats is crucial to minimize the damage that occurred.

Diversity and Commonality also are very effective in mitigating the above-mentioned threats. Diversity strategy must be extended to all the software, computers, networks that are being used in the energy sector. Modeling fault-tolerant system architectures with design diversity can help. Diversity in national infrastructure involves the introduction of intentional differences into systems such as vendor source, deployment approach, network connectivity, targeted standards, programming language, operating system, application base, and software version. Two systems are considered diverse if their key attributes differ, and nondiverse otherwise. When a hacker tries to enter a system with diversity, it will be difficult for cyber attackers to invade the systems which is an advantage with Diversity

On the other side, commonality is also needed when certain security parameters must be taken care of by all the systems. These best practices include regular security software updates, virus detection, employee training, security awareness programs, and regular audits to ensure security compliance. All these practices are essential for systems to work as designed without being vulnerable. Keeping most of the security policies – small, online, simple, and enforceable will help the energy sector to be protected.

In short, Cyber security is becoming very important in Oil & Gas, Energy sectors. IoT technology is making firms build systems easily yet vulnerable to cyber threats. It’s important to learn from the previous cyber-attacks and try not to get affected by the same. These solutions along with proper collaboration to share real-time hazard information with analytical frameworks will work for the energy sector to stay safe against an attack and reduce cyber risks significantly.