Thursday, December 9, 2021

Review - 2021 Chemical Security Seminars – Cyber-Physical Convergence

Yesterday was the 2nd of three weekly Chemical Security Seminars that for a second year are taking the place of the Chemical Security Summit due to Covid-19 pandemic. Again, because of other commitments, I was only able to take in one of the presentations; “Cyber-Physical Convergence in the Private Sector”. Copies of the slides for many (sadly not all) of the presentations will probably be available next month.

NOTE: See my post about last week’s presentation on ChemLock.

According to the agenda for yesterday’s seminar, the presentation was to be focused on “operating in today’s threat environment of hybrid attacks that target both physical and cyber assets and the risksassociated with siloed security functions.” The two presenters were:

• Sandra Parker, Global Improvement Director – Cybersecurity, Dow, Inc., and

• Bradford Willke, Senior Advisor for Cyber-Physical Convergence, Infrastructure Security Division, CISA

Each of the speakers provided a brief overview of the topic from their different perspectives and then the moderator, Todd Klessman, Deputy Associate Director, CISA Chemical Security, guided a discussion on the topic with help from questions from the audience.

I enjoyed both presentations and the discussion afterwards. Parker and Wilke both had valuable insights into the problems associated with providing security for a modern chemical manufacturing operation. Unfortunately, the discussion was targeted at large corporate operations where you can find security operations centers and separate silos for IT, OT, and physical security. There was little here that would be of much help to medium to small size chemical facilities. And, while safety operations were mentioned, there was little discussion about integrating safety into security planning or security into safety risk management.

For more details about the presentation, see my article at CFSN Detailed Analysis - https://patrickcoyle.substack.com/p/2021-chemical-security-seminars-460 - subscription required.

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