Cybersecurity Month Events Begin With NRTC Critical Infrastructure Webinar

Cybersecurity Awareness Month, led by the National Cybersecurity Alliance, begins on Sunday, Oct. 1. Once again, NRTC is a participating in the Cybersecurity Awareness Month Champion program.  Rural organizations have organized cybersecurity informational events throughout the month. Among the month’s earliest will be an NRTC webinar, “Protecting Critical Infrastructure: Navigating NIST Compliance for Broadband and Electric Co-ops.”

The hour-long webinar begins at 2 p.m. Eastern Time on Wednesday, Oct. 4. The nine-year old National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Cybersecurity Framework, developed by industry, academic and government experts, as a set of best practices to protect U.S. critical infrastructure, including the electric grid and electronic communications. It has been translated into several languages and has evolved into a set of internationally recognized guidelines. The recently released 2.0 version of the framework is currently in a public comment period, with comments due Nov. 4.

The webinar will feature speakers from NRTC partner SilverSky and TrustMAPP, a Minnesota-based firm that does security assessments for clients. The webinar will focus on framework compliance for rural broadband and electric cooperative members. Registration is now open and a recording will be available following the webinar.

NTCA – The Rural Broadband Association is the lead organizer of the CyberShare Summit, scheduled for Oct. 29-31 in Pittsburgh, PA. The keynote speaker will be retired Air Force Brigadier General Gregory Touhill, director, CERT Division, Software Engineering Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. Session topics on the agenda include FBI threat analysis, vendor security for the supply chain, maintaining a workforce trained to fight online attacks and others. Other rural organizations including NRECA, ACA Connects, the Rural Wireless Association, and the Wireless Internet Service Providers Association are industry association partners for the event. NRTC is one of 10 conference sponsors.

Meanwhile, NRTC also sponsored the recently posted NRECA Along Those Lines podcast, “Lessons Learned From a Co-op Cyberattack.” Two years ago, Delta-Montrose Electric Association (DMEA) in Colorado was hit by a ransomware attack severely affecting business systems, including phones and email communications, customer information and meter data management. The attackers encrypted DMEA files, rendering them useless. It took several months to recover from the damage and build new cybersecurity protections. In the podcast, DMEA Chief Information Officer Bob Farmer and IT Manager Jay Suckey describe how they discovered how the attacker gained access to the co-op’s systems and the steps they took to guard against future incidents.

Update, Oct. 2:  In addition to participating in the Oct. 4 webinar, NRTC partner SilverSky is preparing a weekly series of blog articles for the NRTC site to run throughout the month.  Tom Neclerio, SilverSky’s CISO (chief information security officer) and senior VP, Security Services, will begin the series later this week by looking at compliance and governance cybersecurity strategies for critical infrastructure. In other articles, Neclario will cover topics ranging from the five pillars of the NIST Cybersecurity Framework to cybersecurity supply chain risk management.