Ameren: Automated Testing Mechanisms to Safeguard IT and OT

Deck: 

Top Innovators

Fortnightly Magazine - November 2024
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Public Utilities Fortnightly highlights and celebrates each year the innovators at utilities and what they created. In 2024, the awards were given out in October in Washington, D.C. and the majority of the conversations with these tenacious teams were featured in the October issue. 

Here, PUF brings the remaining four winners of the innovator awards: teams from Ameren, Entergy with Enchanted Rock, Ontario Power Generation, and PG&E. There is much to take in, learn from, and perhaps emulate.

 

PUF's Steve Mitnick: Give an overview of this innovation and its impact. Explain this idea of an adversary and testing the system with folks pretending to be bad actors.

Ryan Gibbs: Our evolution at Ameren from the traditional red team, penetration-type testing has come a long way. Consistent with a lot of other organizations and industries, adversaries want to harm or compromise organizations, targets, and people. 

Whether bad actors, threat actors or individuals, they'll deploy techniques to take advantage of vulnerabilities and look for weaknesses. It can be people or technology. Techniques that are effective may not work everywhere. We closely watch those techniques being used in the wild that are successfully compromising targets and take note.

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