The digitalization of the energy industry has led to a convergence of operational and informational technologies across metering infrastructures worldwide. This OT/IT convergence brings with it all the benefits of the connected, IoT era such as personal energy management insights, automated energy management and grid transparency. However it has also resulted in increasingly complex OT/IT ecosystems creating with new areas of vulnerability and increasing exposure to attacks.
Increasing amounts of data, interconnected utility infrastructures, regulation and a general awareness of security and privacy issues raise the pressure also on smart metering security. E360 is our response to the most stringent security requirements.
The Internet of Things (IoT) opens the gate for endless opportunities in the energy sector. Unfortunately, such diverse opportunities can arouse another type of energy: the malicious one. The threat of unanticipated security breaches is not only about loss of income or reduced customer satisfaction, but finally about consumer privacy and ultimately about electricity network stability.
Cyber security is widely discussed in the energy sector, but until now it has been rather unclear in many energy utilities how to start developing it in concrete business terms. This summer, two announcements in the EU provide guidance from the regulatory side and support in defining the direction of the next steps. For the daily management of information security, industry standards provide a practical framework.
The attack that switched off the lights in Ukraine at the end of 2015 pushed energy sector cyber security into the spotlight. In the everyday routine of utilities, attacks have been common for a long time, but today hackers are getting more systematic and professional.
In the latest release of its end-to-end smart grid platform Gridstream, Landis+Gyr has made communication security a key priority for the data exchange between interoperable smart meters and head end system (HES) via power-line communications (PLC).
