Consequence-based resilient architectures

Abstract

As described in Lee et al., cyber-attackers conducted a coordinated, multifaceted operation against three distribution companies on 23 December 2015, resulting in a customer outage of nearly 4 hours. The significance in this event does not originate from the infiltration of the electric sector; on the contrary, Gorman, Toppa, Perlroth, Dearden, and Borger indicate they have been compromised before and will continue to be compromised in the future. Nor was this event significant because it harkened the arrival of some previously unknown, sophisticated industrial control system (ICS) malware, as Karnouskos, Fidler and Matrosov et al. argued was the case with Stuxnet. Rather, the significance of the December 2015 event stems from the means by which the attackers interfaced with and, ultimately, used the energy system design to their advantage.