On 24th May a presentation was give by Mr Peter Hazell of Yorkshire Water on Cyber Security - Are your engineering processes safe?

The event was initiated by the IET's C&A TPN & arranged by the IET YHRN & held at the Rose Bowl venue in Leeds which is part of the Leeds Beckett University Campus

The talk highlighted the dangers of applying unmodified information security principles to the engineering environment and looked at how industrial structure impacts on operational security.

The presentation mainly focussed on the Power Generation and Oil & Gas Industries where significant incidents from the past were highlighted showing vulnerabilities that could be a target for cyber attacks.Of significance, particular in the early 1980's, there was an historic disconnect between the Operating Technology (OT) and Information Technology (IT) teams before security became a mainstream issue.The presentation cited several incidents acoss different installations but drew attention to distinguishing between historical type outages and those that appear similar but could have been caused by a cyber attack.This brings into question the time for forensic evidence of not only fixing the problem ASAP but finding out what exactly caused the problem in the first place when engineers are under pressure to restore the plant as quickly as possible without being given the time to analyse all the possible options of what actually caused it. Using RAM & PEAR was highlighted as the methodology for HAZOP Assessment.