Yet another standard? No. What you'll see this month is a tool designed to bring together all the relevant cybersecurity standards and put them in an appropriate context - a framework - so you can manage cybersecurity risk more effectively. (And yes, managing that risk is everyone's business, regardless of job title.) A year ago, on Feb. 12, 2013, President Obama issued Executive Order 13636, titled "Improving Critical Infrastructure Cybersecurity." The Executive Order instructed the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) to develop a voluntary Cybersecurity Framework that would provide a "prioritized, flexible, repeatable, performance-based, and cost effective approach for assisting organizations responsible for critical infrastructure services to manage cybersecurity risk." The definition of "critical infrastructure" in the Executive Order is: "Systems and assets, whether physical or virtual, so vital to the United States that the incapacity or destruction of such systems and assets would have a debilitating impact on security, national economic security, national public health or safety, or any combination of those matters." As everyone working in the power industry understands, power generation and transmission assets are part of that critical infrastructure.
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