Our daily lives are more and more connected online. This includes our utility grids. Jojo Maalouf, Hydro Ottawa's Director of Cybersecurity and IT Infrastructure, joins thinkenergy to discuss the role of cybersecurity in the energy sector. From cybersecurity threats, like cyber warfare and ransom-seeking hacktivists, to the measures required to defend our energy systems. Plus, how AI both helps and complicates matters. Listen in to learn what's driving change and the collaboration needed to protect the grid.

Related links

• Ontario Cybersecurity Framework: https://www.oeb.ca/regulatory-rules-and-documents/rules-codes-and-requirements/ontario-cyber-security 

• Get Cyber Safe resources: https://www.getcybersafe.gc.ca/en 

• Jojo Maalouf on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jojo-maalouf-cism-cissp-0546b03/ 

• Trevor Freeman on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/trevor-freeman-p-eng-cem-leed-ap-8b612114/ 

Hydro Ottawa: https://hydroottawa.com/en 

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Transcript:

 

Trevor Freeman  00:07

 

Welcome to think energy, a podcast that dives into the fast, changing world of energy through conversations with industry leaders, innovators and people on the front lines of the energy transition. Join me, Trevor Freeman, as I explore the traditional, unconventional and up and coming facets of the energy industry. If you have any thoughts, feedback or ideas for topics we should cover, please reach out to us at thinkenergy@hydrottawa.com Hi everyone, welcome back. It won't be a surprise to anyone listening that our energy systems, like much of the rest of our lives, are becoming more and more connected and more online than ever before. Let's just take a look at our own personal lives. We've got apps that can control multiple aspects of our homes. For example, for my phone, I can adjust temperature, set points and fan speed heating and cooling in my house, I can turn on or off lights, both inside and outside. I can look and see who just rang my doorbell, even if I'm in another city, and I can check and see where my vehicle is, whether it's charging or not. And I can even turn it on all from my phone. And I would consider myself like middle of the road in terms of how connected and online I am. There are even further examples of this in some of those ultra-connected homes. This is part of our fast paced and constant evolution towards invenience and using technology to find solutions to problems that we didn't always know existed, and maybe they didn't actually exist. We've all heard that term, the Internet of Things, referring to this ultra-connected world where it's not just people talking over the internet, but our devices and systems are talking as well. I was absolutely floored when I was doing some research on this podcast to find out that this term, the Internet of Things, was first used 25 years ago, in 1999 when I first wrote the text for this. I put a placeholder in to say, oh, it's been around for over 10 years. And then when I actually did my research, it's over 25 years. Think about how far we've come since that idea was thought of in 1999 how different life is today than 1999 our energy systems and our utility grids are undergoing a similar transition. I talked about this a little bit with Hydro Ottawa's Jenna Gillis in a previous episode about grid modernization. So go back and have a listen to that. If you haven't already, we are adding more and more data points to our grids, and that includes sensors, smart switches, fault detectors, smarter meters, etc., etc. Even for hydro Ottawa, a local distribution company with around 350,000 customers, we are talking about many times that number of smart devices in the coming years, all connected, all trading data between themselves and our central systems and the smart folks who run them now, there is a ton of upside to this transition, and that's why we're doing it. More data leads to better decision making, a better view of what's happening, whether that's during an outage or at times when the grid is heavily utilized. It lets us get more out of the equipment we have, react and adjust to the needs of our customers, and react and adjust to the needs of the grid. It will lead to faster restoration during outages, and sometimes that restoration will be automatic without having to roll a truck. It will allow us to better integrate distributed energy resources like small scale solar and storage and other things into our grid for the benefit of our customers and the grid. There is no question that this is a move in the right direction, and hydro Ottawa is leaning into this aspect of the energy transition to build a smarter grid for our customers. However, it does highlight something that has long been a priority for us, cyber security. With so many connected devices, with so much data out there, we need to be extremely vigilant and rigorous with our digital security. Cyber-attacks on utility infrastructure are not theoretical. In 2015 and 2016 attacks on the Ukrainian power grid resulted in large scale power outages in that country, as we increasingly rely on electricity for so many aspects of our lives, attacks like this, whether by nation states or bad actors seeking financial gain, can have devastating consequences. Luckily, this is something that has been a priority for us for many years, and as the threats become more sophisticated, so too do our strategies to protect our systems and our grid from those attacks. Joining me today to talk about this is Hydro Ottawa's director of cybersecurity and IT infrastructure. Jojo Maalouf, JoJo, welcome to the show.

 

Jojo Maalouf  04:46

 

Thanks for having me.

 

Trevor Freeman  04:47

 

All right, so Jojo, cyber security is a little bit of a buzzword that a lot of folks have probably heard in a bunch of different contexts. Help us unpack it a little bit. What do we actually mean when we talk about cybersecurity threats and cybersecurity prevention, I guess?

 

Jojo Maalouf  05:05

 

Very good question, right? So, I mean, let's kind of simplify things, so we obviously have these adversaries, right? And these adversaries are trying to get into organizations networks. We hear a lot of the sensitivity or the criticality of information, so they're trying to obtain that information. And, you know, can they look at potentially monetizing that? Really what we're kind of trying to do, or what cyber security is, is, if you think about it, we have these bad guys, these adversaries. They're trying to get into organizations they possess or introduce some sort of level of risk. What we are trying to do as people in cyber security is defend those organizations from those risks and those adversaries. So, in order for us to do that, we need to put together a program. We need to make sure we have the relevant controls in place, because, at the end of the day, what we're trying to do is mitigate that risk to an acceptable level where the business can run.

 

Trevor Freeman  06:07

 

Yeah, totally. And who are these threats coming from? Like, we hear a lot about state sponsored groups for profit, hackers. There's sort of that hacktivists, kind of ideologically driven group. Who are we worried about in the in the energy industry?

 

Jojo Maalouf  06:20

 

You know, it's very good question. I think, to be honest, you, I think we worry about all of them. I think from from our perspective, threats are threats. And obviously, dependin