Dragos and E-ISAC join forces to strengthen collective defense for the electricity industry
Dragos and the North American Electric Reliability Corporation’s (NERC) Electricity Information Sharing and Analysis Center (E-ISAC) have announced a joint initiative to strengthen collective defense and community-wide visibility for industrial cybersecurity in the North American electricity industry.
The joint initiative enables E-ISAC analysts to gain greater visibility into industrial control system (ICS) cyber threats facing the electric sector through Dragos’s Neighborhood Keeper technology.
E-ISAC analysts will have the ability to view aggregate information about threat analytics and Indicators of Compromise (IOC) as they are detected within Neighborhood Keeper, and then share insights and trends gleaned from this information more broadly with all E-ISAC members, thus enabling the community to collectively defend itself against cyber adversaries.
Originally developed with the support of an award from the U.S. Department of Energy, Neighborhood Keeper is a free, opt-in, anonymized information-sharing network available to all Dragos Platform customers. Dragos customers in the electricity sector will benefit from access to a larger pool of E-ISAC cybersecurity experts trained to analyze and provide feedback on threats and vulnerabilities, and collectively influence detection capabilities.
“The electric community is keenly aware of the kind of cyber threats they face but to date has had to defend against those threats in isolation,” said Robert M. Lee, Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder, Dragos, Inc. “Defending against state and criminal actors is entirely doable when the community operates as a collective and ensures that an attack on one member is seen by all of us. This new capability for the E-ISAC will amplify their important role and responsibility in helping our electric sector customers and members of the E-ISAC.”
Cyber threats targeting ICS/OT networks continue to increase in frequency and sophistication, but data collection and analysis is extremely limited for industrial defenders. Because adversaries can move through ICS/OT networks undetected they are able to continually train and prepare for the next cyber attack.
Neighborhood Keeper is a fundamentally new approach to information sharing that drastically diminishes risk to organizations by reducing the sensitivities around sharing and performing this task at machine-speed.
“The E-ISAC remains focused on threats to ICS/OT networks across the entire North American electricity industry. Staying ahead of our adversaries is vital and our collaboration with Dragos on programs like Neighborhood Keeper underscores the importance we place on collective defense and threat intelligence sharing,” said Manny Cancel, SVP of NERC, CEO of the E-ISAC.
“One of our goals is to establish near real-time situational awareness, indications, warnings, and response capabilities in ICS/OT networks across the electricity sector. Our E-ISAC members want timely, relevant and actionable insight to allow them to prioritize their efforts and secure their networks.”