And electric utility news site UtilityDive reports that many utilities across the country are limiting travel, shifting as many staff as possible to remote work, scheduling meetings as videoconferences, and ramping up hygiene practices. The Edison Electric Institute, a nonprofit that represents US electric utilities, warned in February that as many as 40 percent of utility workers could be home sick, quarantined or at home taking care of sick relatives. Utilities have already been struggling with that balance.
"You need them available at the office, and you can only restrict them to a certain extent-because we're not China–so how does that balance out?" "It's a real touchy subject," says Slowik.
Is remote utilities safe free#
In those scenarios, Dragos' Slowik says, companies have to instead try to limit the biological exposure of their most critical operations teams to prevent them from being quarantined-which is often easier said than done, given that they're free to mingle with potentially infected people during their off-hours.
For many of their most critical customers, and even more so for intelligence agencies, remote work and security don't mix. That means checking that their virtual private networks are patched, implementing multifactor authentication, and testing out remote access scenarios.īut cybersecurity consultants who actually work with those high-stakes clients-including electric utilities, oil and gas firms, and manufacturing companies-say that it's not always so simple. Late last week, the US government's Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency issued an advisory to critical infrastructure companies to prepare for remote work scenarios as Covid-19 spreads. In some cases, working from home isn't an option at all.Ĭompanies with especially sensitive data or operations often limit remote connections, segment networks to limit a hacker's access if they do get in, and sometimes even disconnect their most important machines from the internet altogether. But as the US hunkers down to limit the spread of Covid-19, cybersecurity measures present a difficult technical challenge to working remotely for employees at critical infrastructure, intelligence agencies, and anywhere else with high-security networks. It's a rule of thumb in cybersecurity that the more sensitive your system, the less you want it to touch the internet.