ESIC Seminar

About the event

“Cyber Risk Analysis and Threat Mitigation Strategies Against DER and IoT Infrastructure Attacks” to be presented by Dr. Adam Hahn and D. Jonathan Sebastian.

Overview:

The overall penetration level of Distributed Energy Resources (DERs) is growing significantly due to ongoing cost decreases and greater public interest towards renewable energy. However, this requires the introduction of new planning, management, reliability, and cybersecurity strategies that address upcoming challenges. Among the pending issues is analyzing the risks of large-scale DER deployments when these become part of large-scale networks, like the Internet of Things (IoT).

Furthermore, the distributed nature of DER presents challenges as devices are increasingly owned and controlled by outsiders, while utilities have insufficient oversight to mandate strong security levels for these devices. Therefore, an array of new technical challenges must be addressed by stakeholders to manage this emerging risk. This presentation introduces novel approaches to identify, measure and mitigate threats to grid operations based on DER-targeted attacks. The talk then touches lightly on the risks of open data and its implications to the power grid; particularly on the ways that the information can be abused by unauthorized parties.