Tech professionals train locally to defend nation’s critical infrastructure
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IDAHO FALLS — A group of tech professionals from across the country recently completed a local advanced cybersecurity training course to learn how to better secure the nation’s critical infrastructures.
“Critical infrastructure are those systems around us that are so critical that if they fail it would have a significant impact on life, on property, or on the economy of the United States,” said Marty Edwards, a U.S. Department of Homeland Security administrator in charge of the course.
The Industrial Control Systems Cybersecurity training course is offered at the Idaho National Laboratory’s Control Systems Analysis Center, and is hosted by the DHS Industrial Control Systems Cyber Emergency Response Team.
“This is probably the most sophisticated site in the world for this type of training,” Edwards said. “There aren’t very many companies that will allow for example their personnel to turn loose a virus inside their actual environment, to test or to play with how to defend against it.”
Recent participants who completed the course are of the 100th class and come from various types of industries such as oil and gas, water or power. Some 4,000 professionals from around the country have been trained since 2007.
Throughout a week long course trainees learn how to protect control systems that manage industries, which manage all aspects of daily living.
“The control systems are the ones that are truly managing water, electricity, sewer, any of the chemical plants. If we don’t put the protections in, if we don’t safeguard, I may not have any water tomorrow, I may not have any electricity for a week, that is a critical issue,” trainee Pedro Serrano said.
As a part of the training, participants are separated into two teams, red and blue. They undergo a simulation were red attempts to hack into a chemical plant’s control system and blue must protect the chemical plant while warding off the attack.
“We have taken great care in this course to make it very representative of what you will actually see in industry so real pumps, valves, tanks they’re smaller than a real chemical plant, but they’re very representative of what happens,” Edwards said.
Edwards said courses stay up-to-date on the latest hacking methods. He said the most common way industries are hacked are through phishing emails.
“In this kind of facility we have set it up to allow the individuals to understand and learn how to detect and defend against these types of attacks,” Edwards said.
Another recent hacking trend is ransomware, which is a type of malicious software that blocks access to a computer system until money is paid.
Recently an eastern Idaho municipal infrastructure was targeted by a ransomware attack. Bingham County computer systems — including 911 services — were partially down for several days due to an attack. County officials ended up paying part of the ransom to regain access to their computers.
Thankfully though, most the county information was backed up. Participants at the training course say backups are a critical first step in cyber security.
“The first thing I would recommend is that you back your data up,” participant Eric Robinson said. “The most important thing you ever do is have a good backup of anything (you) have whether it’s critical or not.”