The holiday season has not been a joyful time with respect to Ukraine’s power grid. Indeed, hackers have struck the Ukraine with two major cyberattacks during the month of December over the last two years and a third would have serious ramifications that would be felt around the world. Andrea Carcano, Founder and Chief Product Officer at Nozomi Networks commented below.
Andrea Carcano, Founder and Chief Product Officer at Nozomi Networks:
“The Ukraine attacks of 2015 & 2016 left Kiev residents in the cold, a situation that reverberated to utilities around the globe. You can imagine the board-level discussions that started with “Could this happen to us?”, The Ukrainian incidents motivated power companies to redouble their efforts to improve their cybersecurity programs and increase investments. In-depth analysis available from the Ukrainian attacks, made it was clear that utilities needed to take a number of steps to get visibility and situational awareness into industrial control systems (ICS) that operate critical aspects of power generation and transmission. It is key for utilities and other critical infrastructure operators to apply artificial intelligence and machine learning to detect systems anomalies and unusual network behaviour that would indicate the earliest stages of an attack. As power companies deploy these latest innovations for industrial monitoring and detection, they will be able to more quickly respond to block attackers before they can do significant harm. The Kiev situation served as a wake-up call to the power industry and highlighted the imminent need for power companies globally to harden their defenses and take the steps needed to detect and protect their customers from cyber-attacks that might turn the lights out elsewhere.”
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