Integrated Cybersecurity Solution for the Vulnerability Assessment, Monitoring and Protection of Critical Energy Infrastructures

"EnergyShield defines a defensive toolkit for energy system operators and combines the latest technologies for vulnerability assessment, supervision and protection. The toolkit is an innovative and adaptive combination of tools designed to secure critical infrastructures and provides a set of functionalities that could be implemented domain-agnostic. EnergyShield toolkit is tested in two real-life scenarios in Bulgaria and Italy involving actors from the entire EPES value chain. When defining the scenarios on the operational technologies environment business continuity, security procedures in place and limited access to data were considered." says Lavinia Dinca, Cybersecurity expert at SIMAVI.

EnergyShield project proposes an integrated solution for critical infrastructures that covers heterogeneous attack vectors. This approach is in line with the strong growth of cybersecurity requirements in the energy sector over the last years. Bringing together energy system operators, cybersecurity experts and IT professionals, EnergyShield addresses the gaps between those fields and defines scenarios that combine information technologies and operational technologies. As it takes a long time to establish efficient cybersecurity groups that cover all domain areas of the business and deploy different types of tools for different attack vectors, Energy Shield prepares and demonstrates a flexible set of tools for energy system operators.

EnergyShield: Innovative contributions to European cybersecurity and privacy

EnergyShield project follows an integrative approach to assess, monitor, protect and manage security threats and insights. Several tools are combined in a toolkit that provides a unique perspective and supports the needs of the Electrical Power and Energy System (EPES) value chain in predicting cyber and physical attacks, learning from previous attacks and preventing future attacks. The assessment tools add focus on the critical infrastructure components and leverage the security behaviour to improve the vulnerability analysis, monitoring & protection tools focus on allowing rapid attack response, while tools gradually automate the security information and event management process and integrate vulnerability assessment tools to create security metamodels.

EnergyShield develops best practices, guidelines and methodologies supporting the deployment of the solution to encourage widespread adoption of the project results in the EPES. EnergyShield builds a user community within the EPES sector to increase the data sets used to train machine-learning algorithms, and to allow the rapid sharing of incident reports and incident response best practices. From approaching and disseminating results to critical infrastructure ICT suppliers, industry associations and cyber-security competence centres to publishing papers and white papers that provide insights on the implementation of advanced cybersecurity tools, Energy Shield enforces EU legislation and contributes to EU policies, mainly via helping to define the scope of cybersecurity in the energy sector.  

EnergyShield Consortium consists of 2 large industrial partners (SIMAVI and PSI), whereof SIMAVI is taking the lead supported by 6 innovative SMEs (foreseeti, Tech Inspire, Konnekt Able, SI-GA, L7 Defense, Software Company) 3 academic research organizations (KTH, CITY, NTUA) and 7 end-users (Kogen Zagore, MVETS Lenishta, ESO,, CEZ Distribution Bulgaria, MIG 23, D I L DIEL Ltd, IREN Italy).

Read more details on the EnergyShield dedicated page and find out more about the latest update, project results and benefit to its end-users.

Visit their official website and social media accounts:

​ https://energy-shield.eu/

​​ @EnergyShield_

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