Over the past two weeks as I have been preparing for the August Conference, I had conversations with a number of electric and water industry personnel.
The discussions spanned the gamut from complete denial to – yes we did have problems but did not consider them cyber. The denial came from several electric utility (nuclear and non-nuclear) and a water industry individual. They were adamant they were not connected and haven’t had problems.
As an aside, I have yet to see a system without some form of remote electronic connection.
The other end of the spectrum was a discussion with nuclear plant personnel from two different utilities. After discussing the recent Hatch Nuclear Plant cyber incident, the response from both was our nuclear plant scrammed (automatically shut down) when we connected a laptop to some critical equipment.
They didn’t think of it as a cyber problem at the time. Unfortunately with the lack of control system cyber security forensics, we will never know.
Joe Weiss
