CISA Webinar on Protecting Against UAS

Earlier this week the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency announced that the Interagency Security Committee (ISC) would be holding a webinar on “Protecting Against the Threat of Unmanned Aircraft Systems” next Thursday. The webinar is based upon their publication from last November of the same name.

The webinar web page makes an important point about UAS mitigation issues:

“Although most agencies do not have the authority to disable, disrupt, or seize control of an unmanned aircraft, there are other effective risk reduction measures they may implement. This webinar will provide best practices from the ISC’s UAS publication that any organization or facility can use to mitigate UAS threats.”

The ISC is a collaborative organization that provides leadership to the nonmilitary federal community supporting physical security programs that are comprehensive and risk based, though much of their work would be applicable to critical infrastructure facilities. I was a little concerned that this webinar might be somewhat restricted, but my registration was approved without apparent question.

Anyone interested in watching the webinar (which should be anyone with security responsibilities that may include protecting against UAS incursions and attacks) can register for the webinar here.

More EO 13650 Meetings – February 2014

I got another email today from the EO 13650 Working Group and did a check of their web site. Between the two sources I have identified three community outreach activities that will be taking place in the last half of this month; two public listening sessions and a webinar.

Listening Sessions

There will be two more listening sessions this month;

• Baton Rouge, LA (In Person, Webcast); and

• Newark, NJ (In Person, Webcast)

The registration links are via GovEvents.com. Provisions for calling in comments during the webcast of these meetings have been made. Written comments may be submitted via the Federal eRulemaking Portal (www.Regulations.gov; Docket # DHS-2013-0075) NOTE: For some reason neither the email nor the registration sites mention the docket number even though the recommend using the Regulations.gov web site for submitting comments; an odd oversight.

The Newark meeting is the third attempt at holding this meeting (2-5 and 2-13). Previous registrations do not roll over to this meeting. If you signed up for the earlier attempts at holding this meeting, you need to go through the process again.

Webinar

The OSHA EO 13650 web page has information about another TASC program webinar about the EO listening session process. The registration for this webinar (limited slots available, register soonest) is being handled via the EPA.ConnectSolutions.com web site. There is not nearly as much information available at this registration site as found on the GovEvents.com site.

EO 13650 Webinar

I have signed up to receive emails from the EO 13650 Working Group about the actions that the group is taking in support of the President’s Executive Order on Improving Chemical Safety and Security (EO 13650). This has mainly allowed me to get advance notice of various meetings, public listening sessions and webinars on EO 13650. I received one such email notice yesterday about a slightly different webinar, one specifically targeted to residents in New York and New Jersey.

To date these webinars and public listening sessions have been focused on receiving public input on chemical safety and security issues. The ones that I have listened to have been essentially opportunities for various industry and activist organizations to rehash their well established points of view about matters of chemical safety and security. This has been a worthwhile exercise as it has allowed representatives from EPA, OSHA and DHS chances to publicly ask questions to clarify their understanding of these various positions.

This webinar, to be held on February 2^nd (more about sign-up details below) will apparently have a slightly different focus. According to the email it is designed to help people who want “to prepare for the in-person listening session in Newark, NJ on February 5^th in order to provide comments and feedback on the Executive Order to help improve the safety and security of chemical facilities”.

The webinar is being hosted by the EPA’s Technical Assistance Services for Communities (TASC), and EPA community outreach organization. It is specifically focused at “Community members and grass roots organizations, including first responders, in the New York/New Jersey area, interested in improving the safety and security of chemical facilities”.

I have signed up for this webinar (though I am certainly not a resident of the NY/NJ area) because of its intent to “provide additional information about the New York and New Jersey areas”. I’m hoping that will include information about the pilot project on interagency cooperation that is being headed by the EPA in Region 2 (The Effective Chemical Risk Management Project, Federal Region 2). There has been very little public information about this project and I’m hoping that it will be discussed in this venue.

The email provides a link for signing up for the webinar - https://epa.connectsolutions.com/eo13650nj021314/event/event_info.html. It is a relatively easy sign-up process with a minimum of personal information required. Interestingly I don’t see any information about an OMB approved information collection request for the information being requested. I also have a very low level of concern about the information I provided being shared with Skeo Solutions, the private-sector organization that will apparently be conducting the webinar for TASC.

NPPD Publishes Chem EO Listening Sessions Notice – 11-19-13

The DHS National Protection and Programs Directorate (NPPD) published a notice in today’s Federal Register (78 FR 69433-69434) announcing the next two public listening sessions being held jointly with OSHA and EPA concerning the President’s Chemical Safety and Security Executive Order (EO 13650). It also lists the dates for two webinars that will serve a similar purpose.

The notice provides addresses for the previously announced listening sessions in Springfield, IL (today, kinda late huh?) and Orlando, FL (December 11^th). The later sessions are not listed.

The notice lists a new (to me anyway) on-line service for registering for federal government events; www.GovEvents.com. The notice states that:

“If you wish to attend any public listening session and/or a Webinar and/or make an oral comment/presentation at both the in-person and Webinar listening sessions, you must register at www.GovEvents.com. “

As of this writing (06:05 CST) today’s meeting is listed (on page 2) but the December 11^th session is not. The November 25^th webinar is listed, but the December 16^th webinar is not listed. The registration process is relatively painless.

NOTE: This site requires registration, but it has some peculiar rules. Unless you belong to a listed government agency or contractor you have to select ‘government employee/military’ to get through the registration process. They really need a ‘private citizen’ listing if they are going to require the use of this site for meeting registrations. Once registered in their system you can sign in via LinkedIn or Facebook accounts.

VCAT Webinar

Bridget O'Grady has a blog post over at the Association of State Drinking Water Administrators (ASDWA) website that notes that the Chemical Sector-Specific Agency (CSSA) in the DHS Office of Infrastructure Protection will be holding a webinar to discuss their Voluntary Chemical Assessment Tool (VCAT).

Background

As I have noted before the VCAT was designed to provide a method of assessing the security vulnerabilities of non-regulated chemical facilities, though I firmly believe that a VCAT assessment would also be valuable for facilities regulated by such programs as CFATS or MTSA.

One of the beneficial uses of the program is to look at the comparative effectiveness of various proposed security measures. Once the current facility information is entered into the system a risk score is provided. Subsequent changes to the facility information reflecting proposed security measures will change the risk score allowing the facility security manager to conduct a cost benefit analysis of various possible security measures.

The CSSA has not publicly provided any data on the methodology used in the VCAT so it is difficult to assess how well the program deals with the various complexities of the security assessment process. It should, however, provide an analysis that is not influenced by what a particular vendor is selling; something that is not always readily available to security managers.

Alion Science and Technology

An interesting bit of information provided by Bridget’s post led me to the Alion Science and Technology web site. They note that they developed the VCAT using their  CounterMeasures® assessment system. It also claims that the VCAT has been endorsed by ACC and SOCMA, though no links to those endorsements have been provided. I can’t find anything related to VCAT on the ACC site, but there are a number of references (available to SOCMA members only) to VCAT on the SOCMA site.

There is nothing on the CSSA web site that would indicate that Alion was the contractor for the development of the VCAT. That type of information is not typically provided publicly by DHS.

The Webinar

Bridget reports that the webinar will be held on March 20^th, 2013 at 4:00 pm EDT. Personnel wishing to register for the webinar should contact rpross@alionscience.com.

NOTE: Bridget provides the following link to VCAT: http://vcat.anl.gov. That is the link to the VCAT assessment portal and you must have logon information to access that portal. Contact chemicalsector@hq.dhs.gov to get access to that site.

PHMSA Pipeline Safety Webinar

Today the Pipeline and Hazardous Material Safety Administration published a notice in the Federal Register (76 FR 81015-81016) about an upcoming webinar concerning the recently implemented distribution integrity management plan (DIMP; 74 FR 63906) inspection program. As of August 2^nd, 2011 distribution pipeline operators were supposed to have implemented a DIMP program and Federal and State regulators have begun their inspections of these programs. This webinar will allow PHMSA to share general information gleaned from these inspections. The webinar will also address the initial analysis of Mechanical Fitting Failure Reports being submitted under the DIMP regulations.

The webinar will be held on January 25^th, 2012 from 11:00 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. EST via LiveMeeting. The notice provides a link to the PHMSA DIMP web page claiming that there is additional information on the webinar on that page, but as of 7:00 a.m. EST this morning there is no link to any upcoming webinar on that page, only links to old webinars [NOTE: new link on that page now points to registration page PJC 18:25 EST 12-27-11]. The notice also provides a link to a web page for submission of questions before or during the webinar, but that page only provides a link for email submissions to DIMPsupport@cycla.com. The referenced page does request submitters to provide their name, affiliation, as well as phone and email contact information with their submitted questions.

Please note that a Privacy Act notice is provided for information submitted via the Federal eRulemaking Portal (www.Regulations.gov; Docket # PHMSA-2004-19854) but not for email submitted questions and those are being submitted to a Contractor; Cycla Corporation.

The notice provides contact information for Chris McLaren (phone 281-216-4455; Chris.Mclaren@dot.gov) as the POC for the webinar. Hopefully McLaren will have more information than the links provided in the notice.

Blast Effects Webinar

I have talked about how to protect some facility areas from the blast effects in some recent blog posts. Partly as a result of those blogs I was recently invited by Allan Mangold, a reader of this blog, to ‘attend’ a webinar conducted by two companies active in the blast effect protection business, Protective Technologies Group (PTG) and Karagozian & Case (K&C); I have mentioned PTG before. The presentation was given to an engineering firm working on at least one refinery protection project and outlined the blast effect test and design work PTG and K&C could provide. Study of Blast Effects These two companies (in conjunction with some researchers at the University of California San Diego – UCSD) have developed a number of tools to evaluate blast effects and ways to protect a wide variety of structures from those effects. They have tied together through their development efforts computer modeling, physical blast simulation, and live munitions blast testing. They also work with other companies to evaluate a variety of blast protection techniques. The webinar include some really good high speed videos of live blast effects and results of their blast simulation device. Even if you’ve watched Hollywood special effects in blow-em-up action adventure flicks, you would still be impressed by the one film that shows a reflected blast wave interacting with the explosion flame front. As someone who has been too close to an explosion in a building, I really thought the detailed views of the on-going explosion provide a good ‘explanation’ of the effects I have seen in the real world. I was also surprised by the videos of an evaluation of a composite fiber reinforcing polymer (CRFP) coating applied to the back side (away from the blast) of a cinder block wall. I would have expected it to just prevent the damaged wall from providing additional projectiles flying down range. Instead it helped to maintain the physical integrity of the wall (though I’m not sure a building inspector would ‘pass’ the damaged wall). Chemical Facility Blast Effects I am still disappointed that there has not been any published work that I can find on the study of blast effects on things of particular interest to the chemical security community. We really need to understand those effects on storage tanks and piping if we are to provide an adequate defense of these items from potential VBIED attacks. For example, I have noted the need to provide some protection for tank farm dikes from VBIED attacks so that they can still maintain enough physical integrity to contain the spread of chemicals from damaged storage tanks. I’m not sure that the results in the webinar videos are strictly translatable to these dikes. The walls in the videos were anchored to a structure at the top and the bottom (like a building wall); in a dike situation they would only be anchored at the bottom. Talking to Allan (who knows a hell of a lot more about this stuff than I do) about this after the webinar, he wasn’t sure either. Someone is going to have to do this kind of testing if we expect to adequately protect our high-risk chemical facilities. More importantly, someone is going to have to pay for this testing to be done as it seems that there is at least one group able to do the actual work. The question is will this work be funded by chemical companies, chemical manufacturing organizations or DHS. I’m not sure what Allan and his fellow investigators charge, but I suspect it is not cheap (testing to destruction seldom is).

CIKR Learning Series Update 04-29-10

Yesterday DHS updated their Critical Infrastructure Key Resources (CIKR) Learning Series web page to include an announcement about their next webinar: “2010 Hurricane Season: Tools for Understanding Risk”. While this is not strictly a chemical security topic, most chemplant security folks deal with planning for and responding to natural disasters as well. According to the notice this webinar will “highlight HITRAC’s hurricane-related advanced modeling, simulation, and analysis capabilities”. HITRAC is the Homeland Infrastructure Threat and Risk Analysis Center. It is the “Department's infrastructure-intelligence fusion center”, providing “actionable risk-informed analysis for federal, state, local, tribal, territorial, private sector, and international partners”. Using their risk analysis tools to look at hurricane related risks certainly falls within the new ‘all risk’ focus of the Department. Any chemical facility within hurricane distance of the Atlantic or Gulf coasts might find this informative. The webinar will be held on Wednesday, May 12, 2010, 1:00-2:00pm EST. You can register online.

Cyber Security Awareness Webinar

There is an interesting posting over on ControlGlobal.com about an industrial control system cyber security webinar that will be held later this month. The webinar is being sponsored by the Automation Federation and is being run by ISA. The presenter will be Matt Luallen, a co-founder of Encari an information security consulting company. The webinar starts at 11:00 am EST on November 19th. Registration ends on November 18th. There appears to be some confusion about who may attend. The ISA web site shows two pricings for the web cast, $195 for ISA members and $225 for non-members. Unfortunately the link to the registration page takes you through an ISA sign-on page that requires having a member or customer number and password. There is a link to ‘create an account’ with ISA, but it seems to request too much information for my personal security tastes. I haven’t seen any ISA presentations, but they are a ‘respected’ organization in the industrial automation field. This should be a good, informative presentation, and the price appears to be reasonable for corporate education purposes. Still if I were setting this up for ‘my’ high-risk chemical facility, I would sign on to the webinar from a facility conference room and have the entire security management team sit through the presentation. If any reader does participate, I would appreciate hearing some feedback. I would like to share such evaluations, for this and any other chemical security related seminar, with my readers.

CFATS Webinar

The Alliance of Hazardous Material Professionals recently announced that they will be sponsoring a CFATS webinar next week on April 29th at noon EDT. Sue Armstrong, Director of Infrastructure Security Compliance Division (ISCD) at DHS (the action agency for CFATS) will be providing information on the current status of the CFATS program and coming implementation updates. Provisions have been made for participants to ask questions during and after the presentation. The cost for participation is $85 for AHMP members and $105 for non-members. Pre-registration is required. Special Note: I am beginning to hear hints that the OMB may be close to approving the RBPS Guidance document. This means that the SSP and RPBS Guidance document will soon be published and the SVA letters will start to go out to Tier 1 Facilities. This may make this webinar especially important as Ms. Armstrong is in the best position to address the rollout issues.

Webinar on Transportation and Cyber Security

ChemITC is certainly keeping me hoping on the blog this week. In yesterday’s ACC SmartBrief email (you can sign up for the free email news source at http://www.smartbrief.com/acc/) there was a notice about a webinar that ChemITC will be holding next week about the interface between cyber security and chemical transportation security. Sounded like an interesting combination of subjects so I asked the friendly ChemITC Manager, Bridgette Bourge for some additional information and she quickly responded (even though she was down in Houston for the ChemSecure conference). The free (ACC calls it ‘complementary’ but I like the term free) webinar will be held at 10:00 am EDT on Tuesday, March 31st (next week). According to ChemITC it will “provide an overview of transportation security in the chemical industry, with an emphasis on how cyber systems are enabling chemical supply chain security processes”. You can sign up by clicking here and will receive a confirmatory email after completing a short online form. If you can’t make the webinar Bridgette tells me that it will be available on their website in a couple of weeks. The two presenters will both be from Dow Chemical. Henry Ward (Global Supply Chain Director for Transportation Safety and Security) and Craig Casto (Global Leader for its RFID, GPS and AutoID Expertise Center) will “provide a context for security experts in both the cyber and transportation fields to bridge the gap between the important work each is doing on a day-to-day basis”. It certainly sounds like it will be an interesting presentation. I certainly plan to ‘be there’.