IronNet collaborates with New York Power Authority to defend key supply chain partners

IronNet announced an expanded partnership with the New York Power Authority (NYPA), the nation’s largest state public power organization, to secure the state of New York’s public energy ecosystem.

Based on IronNet’s proprietary machine learning and artificial intelligence, the cloud-based cybersecurity solution will provide Collective Defense capabilities to NYPA and its key supply chain partners to strengthen the state’s ability to protect the grid through a unified cyber defense strategy.

“In the same way that utilities band together to provide mutual aid after damaging weather events, NYPA is making collaborative responses to cyber attacks possible,” said Bill Welch, Co-CEO of IronNet. “We are proud to work with NYPA to enable all public utility stakeholders to adopt a proactive defense against any cyber adversary with an eye on the grid—from criminal groups to nation-states.”

Supported by Amazon Web Services, NYPA’s adoption of IronNet’s Collective Defense solution will enable New York municipal utilities, partners, and other relevant critical infrastructure state agencies to create a dynamic, radar-like view of the attack landscape that provides visibility into a wider and deeper range of threats across the state’s entire power grid.

Powered by a network detection and response (NDR) system that tracks network anomalies with behavioral analytics, NYPA’s key supply chain partners can use IronNet’s Collective Defense platform to collaborate in real time to better detect and defend against attacks. This approach further enhances the resilience of New York’s grid amidst the escalating prevalence of attacks on U.S. critical infrastructure.

“Given the rise of sophisticated cyber attacks, we need to help our municipal utilities implement a strong security program that can detect and mitigate attacks in real-time,” said Victor Costanza, Deputy Chief Information Security Officer at the New York Power Authority. “With the technologies provided by IronNet and AWS, the IT and power infrastructures in NYPA’s supply chain ecosystem can collect and share anonymized cyber threat information so we can defend our enterprise networks collectively, raising the security posture of all of us throughout the state.”

Following the success of an initial pilot with five NYPA municipalities, today’s announcement of the expanded partnership will enable the remaining utility companies included in the NYPA supply chain to leverage IronNet’s advanced threat detection capabilities as part of the NYPA Collective Defense community.

Defenders of the state’s IT and power infrastructure will receive alerts on anomalous network behaviors correlated with other Collective Defense participants from the U.S. energy sector at large. In the event of a coordinated attack, the community also benefits from expert guidance from the top cybersecurity professionals of IronNet’s Security Operations Center.

IronNet’s Collective Defense platform serves as an early warning system for all, using only anonymized threat information. This innovative and scalable approach to defending the NYPA energy ecosystem offers a blueprint on how to bridge gaps between the public and private sectors to enhance the protection of U.S. critical infrastructure, as called for in the May 2021 Presidential Executive Order for Improving the Nation’s Cybersecurity.