With the acquisition of Tripwire in 2015, Belden expanded its industrial cyber security offerings to include proactive security monitoring and regulatory compliance solutions. While Tripwire is a leading security and compliance vendor in a number of different industries, such as retail, government and financial services, what do their solutions bring to ICS security?

People in many countries take reliable electricity service for granted. That's because over the years large, mature, highly connected electric grids have been built out. They consist of central power stations that deliver power to major load centers via high capacity power lines. These power lines are branched and divided to provide power to smaller industrial and domestic users over the entire supply area.

This week, the largest electric utility trade show and conference in the U.S., DistribuTECH, is being held. One of the tracks in the conference portion of the event is “Defending the Grid.” The prominence of the topic at this show is due in part to new NERC CIP requirements designed to strengthen reliability and security. Another reason grid protection is a hot topic is high-profile cyberattacks such as the recent one on the Ukraine power system.

Rural India might not come to mind when you imagine a modern Smart Grid of Ethernet-based substations. However, that is just what was installed in 2015 in the Northern Indian province of Haryana. Increasing demand for power from both urban and rural customers led the local utility company to extend the electric power system, adding five new substations. At the same time a new Substation Automation System, that is, a new LAN (Local Area Network) design for communication between devices, was implemented for all substations.

While there have been numerous high profile cyberattacks on industry over the past few years, their consequences have primarily been to steal information (Dragonfly, Flame, Duqu) or interrupt business operations (Shamoon). Stuxnet and the attack on the German steel mill were rare cases where a control system was disrupted as a result of a malware infection.