SIM-X 2021: Operational Emergencies with Simulated Cyber/Physical Attacks

Calvin Kaiser

NEW DATES AVAILABLE!

A NERC CEH SIM Course

$800 total for the two day, 16-hour course

The 9/11 commission concluded “We believe the 9/11 attacks revealed four kinds of failures: in imagination, policy, capabilities and management.  It is therefore critical to find a way of routinizing, even bureaucratizing the exercise of imagination.”

NERC Certified power system operators will be drilled in worst case scenarios where a sophisticated Cyber Attacker has breached a BES Cyber System and is able to maliciously control power system elements.

This workshop will demonstrate how real-time power system simulations can be adapted to enhance a utility’s preparedness for responding to cyber-attacks.

The drill participants will operate a hypothetical power system with hypothetical computer, communications and control systems layered on the geography of Washington State.

The Cascadia PowerSimulator model is purely hypothetical, but based on the geography of Washington state.

The blue team will the play roles of Reliability Coordinator, Transmission Operator, Balancing Authority Operator, Substation Operator and Generator Operator. The red team will play the role of a sophisticated cyber / physical attacker.

The objective of the blue team is to operate the system according to NERC Reliability Standards under normal, emergency and restorative operating conditions.

The red team will attempt to implement malicious control actions due to cyber breaches. The blue team will need to adapt the standard emergency operating procedures to present damage to equipment via over voltages, over loads, extreme shock torques and abnormal frequency violations.

Frederick the Great stated: “He who defends everything defends nothing.” The scenarios will be de-briefed using the CARVER analysis used by the military. This covers Criticality, Accessibility, Recuperability, Vulnerability, Effect and Recognizability.  In these debriefs cross training will take place between power system operators, cyber defenders and system protection experts.

The drills will take place across two days with a total of 16 hours of NERC CEH being provided.

David Wilke

Principal Trainer

IncSys

For over 30 years David has primarily been involved with the development and delivery of both new and continuous operator training, real-time market implementation, and advanced application integration into the control room environment.