Improved Security Standards for Electric Grids

In an effort to address the growing threat of cyber-attacks to the national power grid, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) approved revised reliability standards for cybersecurity management controls. The Critical Infrastructure Protection standards, developed by the North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC), were first proposed in October 2017. As threats to critical infrastructure increase, the government moves to improve its ability to respond to cybersecurity attacks. The revised Critical Infrastructure Protection (CIP-003-07) requires responsible entities to have a policy for declaring and responding to CIP exceptional circumstances and clarifies electronic access control for low-impact BES Cyber Systems.