The May Technical Evening was hosted at the Centurion Country Club. The topic for the evening presented by the MD of H3iSquared Doron Kowensky, covered 'Cyber security on mission critical networks'. A short video on the Stuxnet virus was played to the audience, which went on to illustrate the real present and evolving threat organisations are facing on an ongoing basis. Other topics discussed included introduction to IEC 61850, specific subsection on Utilities & Critical Infrastructure Protection.
Jurie Weidemann (left) thanks Doran after the presentation.
Also introduced were topics such as spanning tree/rapid spanning tree etc, used within industrial redundant networks and their failover times. The concept of layers was also touched on. Clients are invariably faced with either physical (e.g. sabotage) or logical threats, which may originate from within or outside of organisation. The four options available to users to combat the logical threats are policies, firewalls, network management systems and secure access management systems, which could be applied concurrently. Policies may be defining use of USB memory sticks in control domains, while firewalls could be physical hardware or software. At present however, it seems no third-party standard clearly defines who is responsible for the firewall in terms of configuration i.e. IT or control department. A network management system relates to visibility and the use of SNMP to get an insight into what is actually transpiring in the network. Finally, Secure Access Management (SAM), which is normally software, was discussed and while predominantly found in energy applications these will be making their way to the control domain in due course. SAM handles aspects such as login (securely), password management, backup configurations and reporting and could even track key strokes to alert of unauthorised instructions.
Career Day at TUT.
Also this month, TUT provided us an opportunity to represent the SAIMC at the recent Engineering Career Expo. During the event, we were afforded the opportunity to present on career planning. We opted to use our domain (C&I) as an analogy for 'career planning'. In our experience, the students who perform “in service training” seem not always to understand the level of specialisation and associated opportunities that exist within our domain. Typically, students want to be a technician or an engineer with no further consideration given to sub level detail, which was elaborated within the presentation. Should you need a copy of the presentation please contact [email protected]
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