FERC Enhances Reporting Requirements for Cyber Attacks on Power Grid
On June 20, 2019, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (“FERC”) approved a North American Electric Reliability Corp. (“NERC”) petition to adopt Reliability Standard CIP-008-6 to strengthen the reporting requirements for attempts to compromise the operation of the United States’ bulk electric system. The prior Critical Infrastructure Protection (“CIP”) Reliability Standards only required reporting where an incident compromised or disrupted one or more reliability tasks. The new standard applies to all registered entities subject to the CIP Reliability Standards.
NERC $10,000,000 Fine of Public Utility Highlights the Need for Cybersecurity Preparedness and CIP Compliance Programs
On January 25, 2019, the North American Electric Reliability Corporation (“NERC”) asked the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (“FERC”) to approve a settlement issuing a record $10 million fine against an unidentified utility resulting from violations of critical infrastructure protection standards (“CIP”) occurring mostly between 2015 and 2018 (referred to hereafter as the “Settlement Agreement”). Although none of the violations resulted in any reported outages, NERC concluded that the cumulative effect of the violations posed a serious risk to the reliability of the bulk U.S. power grid because “many of the violations involved long durations, multiple instances of noncompliance, and repeated failures to implement physical and cyber security protections.” Settlement Agreement at 12.