Energy Bangla

Energy electricity and environment news portal

Dhaka Thursday,  Mar 28, 2024

Beware of Cyber-Attacks at Power sector

EB Report

Hackers are now a real threat to the ‘sensitive’ or ‘critical’ infrastructures like power stations or grid systems. They can easily penetrate to any such modern computerized systems and cause much damage or even create a hazard to the country’s power sector if enough protective measures are not taken timely. Addressing this issue, the Power division has directed the concerned authorities to take necessary steps to safeguard these critical infrastructures from the hackers.

A workshop was organized on Cyber-Security on last Sunday at the power division office where MIT Connection Science, a US-based Cyber-Security expert team had a presentation on the ways to secure the cyber area of such sensitive infrastructures.

Dr. Tawfiq-e-Elahi Chowdhury (BB), the Energy Adviser to the Prime Minister, Nasrul Hamid, the state minister for Power, Energy and Mineral Resources, Abul Kalam Azad, the Chief coordinator of SDG, Ahmad Kaykaus, the power divisional secretary, Khalid Mahmud, the chairman of Power Development Board (PDB), Muhammad Hossain, the Director General of Powercell and other organization leaders were also present at the workshop.

Muhammad Hossain said that, our generation of electricity is increasing and we need to think about the security of the country’s power sector. We need to setup protective measurements to defend against any cyber-attacks in this sector at the same time we need to learn the recovery procedure from any attack.

Technology is evolving in seconds; sensitive infrastructures like power plants, grid and transmission-distribution system are getting much more prone to cyber-attacks as all the systems are now monitored and maintained by computerized technologies.

In recent times Ukraine faced a massive breakdown in their grid and distribution system due to a cyber-attack. Even in 2012, our neighbor country faced a similar type of power failure at 9 states of the north due to a cyber-attack.

Experts urged on setting up strong firewalls at the network systems to block intruder’s access, update security patches regularly and maintain proper security guidelines at every step of the process chain.

Comment here