Water, Gas, Electricity, Telecom – the Critical Infrastructure of Society
Utility companies provide essential public services, such as electricity, gas, water and telecommunications, to residential, commercial, and industrial customers. Utilities are typically regulated by government agencies to ensure that they provide reliable and affordable services to their customers.
Utilities are often monopolies in a given area. Because of their essential nature and potential for abuse of monopoly power, they are often regulated by government agencies to ensure that they provide reliable and affordable services to their customers.
Since utility companies provide the fundamental services that consumers, governments and businesses need to maintain their normal daily routines, their vulnerabilities can cause massive disruptions in everyday life. Disturb these companies, and the impact of the damage will reach far.
Utility companies are also largely operated digitally these days, which makes them vulnerable to cyber attacks.
Ideas for Utility Companies to Make Use of Cyber Range
Cyber range technology can help critical infrastructure companies prepare for and mitigate cyber security threats in several ways.
- Training: Cyber range technology can provide a realistic simulation environment for training employees on cyber security best practices, including identifying and responding to cyber threats.
- Testing: Cyber range technology can provide simulations of cyber attacks on critical infrastructure systems to help companies identify vulnerabilities and test their cyber defenses.
- Collaboration: Cyber range technology can help facilitate collaboration and coordination between different departments and stakeholders within a company.
- Incident response planning: Cyber range technology can help companies develop and test incident response plans, which can be critical in minimizing the damage caused by a cyber attack.
- Compliance: Many utility companies are subject to regulatory compliance requirements related to cyber security. Cyber range technology can help companies demonstrate compliance by providing a way to test their defenses against simulated attacks and document the results.
How CybExer Can Help
Our cyber ranges support simulation of a wide range of Critical Information Infrastructure facilities, Operational Technology, IoT devices, etc. including, but not limited to, electricity, gas, oil, telecommunication, water supply, agriculture, heating, public health, transportation systems, financial services, and security services.
When simulating such systems, the optimal level of sophistication and technical complexity is highly dependent on the nature of the training or exercise that is being conducted. Our team of experts has vast experience in building the system models with the different level of abstraction. Our approach is to divide the offerings into three high-level groups:
- High-level abstract system simulators – meant to add a business-critical component into the scope of an IT-centric exercise, without requiring technical knowledge about its operation or the process that is being simulated,
- Standard system simulators – targeted to exercising technical aspects of ICS, OT, or IoT systems,
- Custom simulators – designed and developed based on customer request and are intended to mimic a certain system or facility at the desired level of abstraction.
We also support and have experience with integrating customer-supplied systems to our cyber ranges and exercises. Examples of customer-supplied systems that have been integrated with our cyber range include a banking system, Air Command and Control, Traffic Light systems, 4G mobile network nodes, Smart Street Lightning, SCADA, HVAC, CCTV etc.
