Substations and power plants offer a large target for cyber attacks on the European electricity grid. These facilities each contain dozens of critical protection and control devices, and the number of security vulnerabilities is rising sharply.
Figure 1: Number of reported vulnerabilities (OMICRON / GridOps)
At the same time, patching such systems is problematic as they have to be permanently in operation for reasons of security of supply and pre-testing of security updates is impractical due to the lack of an identical test environment. This puts the focus on effective vulnerability management for these systems in order to strengthen the cyber resilience of the power grid.
In order to reduce the effort and complexity involved in identifying and eliminating vulnerabilities, the process should be largely automated. At the same time, it is important to maximize the precision of the assignment of the vulnerability to the existing assets. In addition to a complete asset inventory, this also requires sufficient quality and usability of the information from the advisories. OMICRON therefore proceeds as follows when creating the vulnerability database for StationGuard GridOps:
Process for creating the GridOps vulnerability database:
Gathering of Advisories
Update of the GridOps
vulnerability database
Asset inventory and
vulnerability matching
Risk assessment
Managing vulnerabilities in the power grid, especially in protection and control devices, is a complex task. Automated vulnerability management solutions are required and available to ensure cyber resilience.
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