Cybersecurity Begins with People

CHICAGO —The equation for cybersecurity at your electric cooperative might surprise you.

“Technology is only about 10 percent of the protection because it’s only as good as the people behind it,” said Damon Drake, cyber security engineer at Seminole Electric Cooperative in Tampa, Fla.

“If you allow somebody in that door there’s no point in having a lock on it to begin with,” Drake told a June 8 CFC Forum session. “Securing the human—that’s what it comes down to.”

And that’s a tough one, as Roman Gillen can attest. He said the “difficulty in getting people to take security seriously really was driven home” when his co-op did a cyber protection assessment.

“I received an email from our network administrator saying I need to click on something and without questioning I clicked,” said Gillen, president and CEO of Consumers Power in Philomath, Ore. It was a trick to see who would verify the email before clicking.

“I was the first employee at the co-op to fail that test.”

The Kentucky Association of Electric Cooperatives is developing a system similar to NRECA’s safety achievement program to shore up cybersecurity in its state. Co-op IT professionals will visit their counterparts at other co-ops to ask questions, review policies and compare notes. Statewide CEO Chris Perry said it’s important for co-ops of all sizes to be secure.

“I had one of our smaller cooperatives tell me, ‘They don’t want to attack us,’” Perry said. “That’s not true,” he said, noting the hackers are more interested in Social Security numbers than in knocking out electricity.

Gillen noted that Consumers Power began questioning the need to keep members’ Social Security and driver’s license numbers.

“We decided it was probably more costly for us to have it, so we worked with our software vendor to scrub our databases,” Gillen said.

“I rest easier at night,” he added, and it’s easy to see why.

“The average cyber insurance claim costs $733,000,” said Bill West, vice president of underwriting at Federated Rural Electric Insurance Exchange.

“We have in our minds the picture of a hacker as some 15-year-old in his parents’ basement. That used to be the case but it’s not now,” West said. “Hackers are bots hitting 10 million systems at once, just looking for a vulnerability.”

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