On Thursday, The Illinois Commerce Commission hosted a Cybersecurity Policy Session that focused on the specific roles of government, industry, and third-party stakeholders in protecting the nation’s critical energy infrastructure. Following the December 2015 Ukrainian power outage, which left more than 225,000 customers powerless for six hours, as well as other recent indications of cyber espionage targeting the United States, state regulators have started asking questions of their utilities and taking steps to gauge the cyber vulnerabilities that exist in the Nation’s critical utility infrastructure, including electricity, gas, water and telecommunications. While cybersecurity has not traditionally been addressed by state public utility regulators, this emergent threat has made it necessary for regulators to discern how to best protect the services, data and information valuable to the customers and companies they serve. In an effort to ensure adequate, safe and reliable public utility services, the ICC convened today’s policy session to address these cybersecurity concerns. “Cybersecurity is a concern across all sectors, as hackers know how much we rely on utilities,” said ICC Commissioner Sherina Maye Edwards, who coordinated the policy session.

The session’s first panel, The Role of Government in Cybersecurity, moderated by ICC legal and policy advisor Annie McKeon, brought government officials at the state, federal and local level together to provide updates on ongoing security initiatives and how these efforts are coordinated between government and industry. “The government’s role in cybersecurity is like a neighborhood watch,” said Robert Ivanauskas, an attorney-advisor with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission’s Office of Energy Infrastructure Security. The key, he noted, is testing and developing ongoing plans to respond to potential threats. “We’re all looking out for the bad guys and you can stop them on a nationwide scale and potentially even further.” Presentations from the Session will be available at a later date at www.icc.illinois.gov.