On 29th January 2019 in Lisbon, ENCS held her annual General Assembly to reflect on ENCS’ work in 2018 and look ahead to key industry changes and ENCS initiatives for 2019.
The drive for implementation of Information Security Management Systems (ISMS) resulting from various (EU) regulations provides an opportunity for best practices sharing amongst grid operators and harmonizing approaches by following the same international standards. It is critically important to address differences in vendor maturity in a constructive way if we want to enhance overall security of grid systems and to prevent that certification will become a purpose on its own. Closing the skills gap will be an ongoing effort as well as learning and improving from OT security monitoring systems and -operations implementations.
The main four initiatives agreed by the Assembly are:
- Member project on Information Security Management –ENCS’ member project will gather best practices on implementing ISMS for grid control systems and provide guidance on implementing effective security controls.
- Extended role-based training programme –ENCS is further broadening her training programme adding secure configuration training and incident response exercises.
- Member project on procuring secure components – ENCS’ member project will focus on harmonizing security requirements for procurement of various types’ grid components and requirements based security testing.
- Information sharing to ENCS members security operations teams – ENCS will provide extended vulnerability reporting and incident analysis to her members and increase the security operations expert group activities.
A highlight of the event was the appointment by the General Assembly of Aurelio Blanquet (Director Networks Digital Platform EDP Distrubuição) as the new Chair of the ENCS Assembly Committee and the appointment of Wolfgang Loew (CISO EVN Group) and Mark van den Brink (CIO Stedin) as ENCS Assembly Committee members.
ENCS’ managing director Anjos Nijk commented, “I’m deeply grateful for the achievements and commitment of both the ENCS team and the ENCS Assembly which is again confirmed by the impressive stature of Aurelio, Wolfgang and Mark as recognized leaders in the European energy grid security community. We keep growing the momentum, needed to counter-balance the growing cyber threat.”
