The energy industry is among the largest and most important industries in many industrialized nations. Of the ten largest companies in the world, seven are energy producers and/or related providers. The Middle East power sector is booming and is expected to grow at a rate of 7 percent over the next 10 years, according to the MENA Power report. Another report, published by the Kuwait Financial Centre in September 2013, notes that investments worth $ 283 billion will be made in the energy industry between 2014 to 2018 to help Middle Eastern and North African countries cope with rising demand.
Because the energy industry possesses so much highly confidential and proprietary information and is integral to the health and vitality of the economies in which it operates, it represents an enormous target for cybercriminals. While energy companies need to adhere to a growing body of regulations focused on maintaining records and managing their business properly, the more immediate issue—and one that represents an imminent threat—is protecting the security of the wide range of assets that energy and related companies operate. This includes protecting against everything from malware that might enter the utility grid through a smart meter to government-sponsored cyberattacks designed to shut down nuclear power plants.
A Highly Vulnerable Industry
The energy industry presents unique attributes that make it more vulnerable than others to cyber attack. In fact, one source found that two-thirds of energy companies had experienced
some form of brute force attack—twice the percentage of companies in other industries.
Examples of areas of vulnerability include:
1. Abundance of Potential Ingress Points
There are millions of potential ingress points for malware, hacking attempts and other incursions—from legitimate employee use of the internet for normal day-to-day business activities, to the prevalence of BYOD and contractor access.
2. Vulnerable Smart Grid
The existing smart grid technology had originally been developed with the intention that it would stand apart, in locked industrial site and control centers—making it unavailable to
outside tampering. Those parameters have changed and now connecting that legacy technology to current technology opens it up to all kinds of hacks.
But who is doing the attacking? It might not be what you think. PWC found that while attacks backed by nation-states are making the headlines, utilities are more likely to be hit by other outsiders including:
According to a report by Alert Logic, 61 percent of energy and utility executives consider security to currently be a big problem for the smart grid and 64 percent believed that the grid is not prepared for security threats.
Risks
The risks of cyberattack in the energy industry are enormous and are by no means a new phenomenon, as illustrated by the following examples:
Dealing with highly focused and highly skilled attackers who perpetrate sophisticated incursions into the energy infrastructure, requires a robust and integrated set of capabilities. To prevent such incidents from occurring, energy organizations in the Middle East need to detect cybercriminal activity and respond quickly to suspicious behavior and resolve the issue at hand. For this they need to implement IT security solutions that integrate network, endpoint and malware analysis, threat intelligence and remediation capabilities and don’t just deliver rapid detection and response, but continuous automated incident resolution. When evaluating security technologies, energy companies should make sure the solution has the following capabilities: