How Local Distribution Companies can become cyber-aware

In today’s ever-changing geopolitical climate, LDCs have become potential trophies for cybercriminals who want to disrupt systems, create chaos and reap personal benefits in the process. As a result, there is a growing trend towards cyberattack campaigns led by special interest groups, terrorists, nation states and hacking groups.

Some of these groups could be targeting your customers’ information—such as payment details, names, passwords and phone numbers—which they intend to sell on the black market. Others may be looking for ways to disrupt Ontario’s entire power network by overloading unprotected systems.

An LDC’s first order of operation, should be to conduct a thorough and complete cyber risk assessment. This involves taking time to research prevalent cyber threats targeting LDCs in Canada and across the world. From there, you should work to identify your crown jewels—or the critical systems and data a cybercriminal would most likely be after. Given that it’s impossible to protect every aspect of your operation, this list will be a good starting point in guiding your cybersecurity efforts.

With the high volume of malicious cyber actors—and the pervasiveness of cyberattacks—it’s very likely that, at some point, your LDC will be the subject of a cyber breach. When that day arrives, it’s critical that the breach is detected and thwarted as swiftly as possible.

To effectively mitigate the risk of a serious cyberattack, it’s essential to prepare a breach response strategy in advance that will allow you to anticipate things that could go wrong.

The first step in creating a strategy is to determine what will happen if a breach is detected. Will you have an internal team in place to launch an investigation or will you call a third-party in to handle it? Whichever option you choose, it’s essential to have well-defined processes in place for your team to follow. When a breach occurs, you want forensics to be able to quickly identify which area of your IT infrastructure has been breached, determine what needs to be done to stop it and ultimately track down the perpetrator.

This means you’ll need prior knowledge of your systems and access to a map of your IT infrastructure. This map should outline and properly document all your existing servers, routers and firewalls, among other things. You can also include information about where your organization stores its crown jewels and any vulnerable points of entry. Lastly, take steps ahead of time to make sure your IT logs are properly maintained—meaning they’re turned on and have sufficient capacity to record the information needed to trace a breach.

Modernizing your cybersecurity infrastructure will undoubtedly come with increased costs. Many small and large LDCs in North America have already started leveraging emerging technologies like machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) in other areas of operations, as part of their digital transformation strategic initiatives. Using innovation and leveraging new technologies can also be effective in improving the security postures of your organization, as well as helping to realize substantial savings.

To achieve the optimum efficiency, however, CEOs, CIOs and CFOs must take a holistic approach to their organization’s modernization efforts—and craft a digital transformation strategy that includes cybersecurity. This is particularly salient if you're considering investing in new technologies to improve operational functions—such as load forecasting, demand management, predictive maintenance or customer insights and analytics. In this case, it makes sense to incorporate cybersecurity features into the overall enterprise design efforts of your digital transformation programs. Not only will this leverage the investments you're making to modernize your organization, but it can also help you achieve cost savings while simultaneously improving the organization's risk profile. 

While cybersecurity can be an intimidating topic for many LDCs, it should be treated like any other business risk. By taking time to conduct a risk assessment, implement a breach plan and integrate cybersecurity into your organizational modernization efforts, you’ll be able to affordably defend the critical areas of your business—and the Ontario power grid as a whole.

To learn more about how Grant Thornton LLP can help you with Cybersecurity Assessment, Remediation and Response Services, please us.