October 2021 issue

Field report: Intensive technical training at Vattenfall in Berlin

In the area of training, the Cybersecurity Learning Lab offers customized intensive technical training for companies in the energy and water supply sector as in-house seminars but also as open courses. Vattenfall Wärme Berlin AG has already been using this offer since 2019. After the Corona-related restrictions, we were already able to hold three dates for Vattenfall this year at the Berlin Fraunhofer Forum in Präsenz. Participants of the technical intensive courses were primarily control and telecontrol engineers, team leaders in this area, but also trainers for operating technology and electronic professions.

With a very high proportion of practical content, the technical intensive courses offer participants a very compact, but at the same time also deep insight into the topics of attack threats and defense strategies, especially for process IT infrastructures.

A 3-day course was developed for Vattenfall Wärme, which starts with the current legal requirements and standards and leads via the network and security basics in utilities to the extensive exercises along the "cyber kill chain" the defense basics, the attack detections up to the protection of ICS components.

The hands-on training sessions are conducted on the mobile training platform, which is designed to enable training participants to directly apply what they have learned and transfer it to their daily work. The training is usually conducted by 2 to 3 instructors, which allows for very individual support of the 8-10 participants and ensures successful implementation of the seminars even for groups with different levels of prior knowledge.

Security Talk: Prime Minister of Saxony and President of the Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft met in Görlitz

On August 18, the Prime Minister of Saxony, Michael Kretschmer, and the President of the Fraunhofer Gesellschaft, Prof. Dr.-Ing. habil. Reimund Neugebauer, as part of the Security Talk at the research and training site in Görlitz. They learned about the development of the learning lab site, which opened in 2017, and also about the cooperation with the Zittau/Görlitz University of Applied Sciences. The event also offered a constructive exchange about future challenges and solutions for security-critical systems between experts in the field of cybersecurity as well as business and politics.

Research: AI-based firewall to reliably detect IT attacks in the energy supply sector

On July 01, 2021, the joint project PROTECT funded by the BMWi started (FKZ 03EI6054). Under the consortium leadership of Fraunhofer IOSB-AST, EAM Netz GmbH Kassel, eoda GmbH and Zittau/Görlitz University of Applied Sciences are involved in the development of an AI-based firewall for energy suppliers.

In the research project, methods for AI-based detection of anomalies in the network traffic of energy utilities are to be developed, thus bringing previous firewall solutions to a new level of IT attack detection. Not only the area of business IT, but also process IT will be considered. This area still poses a greater challenge in many utilities with regard to the secure monitoring of network traffic. By using artificial intelligence, it should be possible for utilities to detect a large proportion of attacks securely and automatically and to implement defense mechanisms automatically by adapting firewall rules. At the same time, the number of false alarms is to be significantly reduced.

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