The technical capacity of the utility industry depends heavily on the human factor, and there are very few specialists in the area of cyber security, said Daniel Pisaru, Chief Commercial Officer, Safetech Innovations, at the DigitALL 2022 conference organized by Energynomics.
“There have been many incidents in the industry these days, and we are at the forefront. We are trying to reinforce at the management level the awareness of the need to be prepared for a cyber-attack. Attacks often spread from the inside. The technical capacity of the utility industry depends very much on the human factor. Today, even if Romania is considered a technological hub with competent human resources, the industry is very much concentrated in the support area for multinationals and in the area of operational IT. We see very few cyber security specialists and obviously, the current need is huge,” he said.
“There are many investments in the security area, new instruments are purchased every day, but if they are only put in the infrastructure and no one watches over what alerts those tools can generate – then the tools are in vain. Malware can go undetected by signature-based IPS technology and stay in the company for months – at some point, they start to move sideways and can cause damage like happened with Rompetrol recently,” added Daniel Pisaru.
Safetech has daily discussions with customers and prospects about the best approaches in the field. “We do not feel that the current legislation has any effect. We see the financial-banking environment that is a few years ahead of other industries in terms of cyber security and regulation. That’s where it all comes from! If the regulation is not properly implemented, it does not produce anything. We have discussions with the key entities covered by the NIS Directive and still, after one year, they do not know where to start from. It seems to be written in a different language, which we do not understand… The directive is, however, extremely good and can bring maturity in the industries”, he also stated.
DigitALL 2022 was organized by Energynomics, in partnership with reputed organizations such as CIO Council and BusinessMark, with the support of our partners: ACE – Industrial Software Solutions, Eaton Electric, Nova Power & Gas, Procesio, SAS Romania, Safetech Innovations, Siemens România.
