Cybersecurity standard published to protect global critical infrastructure
to take advantage of this effort and insist that our vendors are certified.”
Members of the WIB Plant Security Working group have already started implementing the requirements into their procurement processes and others around the world are heeding the clarion call.
“Shell has mandated conformance to the WIB standard for all vendors supplying systems to be deployed in Shell’s process control environment starting January 01, 2011,” said Ted Angevaare, PACO EMEA Control & Automation Systems Team Leader. “These requirements will become a standard part of the procurement language saving us a significant amount of time and effort.”
Leading suppliers of industrial process control and automation systems are also starting the process of integrating the requirements into their organizations.
“Adopting the WIB’s security requirements ensures that Invensys has a set of measurable practices in place that enforce a safer and more secure critical infrastructure. Not only do the requirements provide current-state measures, they allow us to continue to improve and adapt to the ever-changing security landscape,” said Ernie Rakaczky, program manager for control systems cyber security at Invensys Operations Management. “From our perspective, this program is a major shift, not only focusing on tactics, but one that puts into place strategic elements that address operational change.”
Cybersecurity at all stages of the industrial product lifecycle
The WIB standard is designed to fit the needs of the end-user — the system owner/operator and reflects the unique requirements for industries like oil and gas, electric power, smart grid, transportation, pharmaceutical, and chemical. The goal is to address cyber security best practices and allocate responsibility at the various stages of the industrial system lifecycle: Organizational practices, product development, testing and commissioning and maintenance and support.
“Security is not a one-time application, but rather a process in which every stakeholder must contribute in order to achieve any significant improvement in operational reliability,” said Auke Huistra, project manager at National Infrastructure against Cyber Crime (NICC). “The WIB requirements are designed with this principle at its core and we are encouraging critical infrastructure stakeholders in The Netherlands to integrate the requirements into their cyber security plans.”
The requirements are further broken down into three levels designed to reflect various starting points of global suppliers and provide a scalable framework to plan improvements over time. In the program, there are Gold, Silver and Bronze levels, each consisting of a set requirements designed to verify that applicable policies and practices are in place, enabled and practiced by the vendor.
A successful global cooperation
From the beginning, industry leaders recognized that given the global nature of industrial cyber security, any effort to standardize cyber security best practices required stakeholder cooperation from different industry sectors and in different regions of the world. The WIB association describes itself as the ideal conduit to guide the creation of the standard given its independent nature and membership composition. Additionally, the initiative needed to reflect and incorporate the important cyber security activities happening internationally so many government agencies, industry working groups and standards bodies were consulted to ensure harmony. For example, major industry standards efforts such as ISA SP99, NIST 800-53, NISTIR 7628 and various international government regulations such as NERC/CIP were reviewed and incorporated where appropriate or expanded to ensure testability. The WIB executive committee has started the process of introducing the WIB PCD requirements into the CEN/CENELEC and IEC international standards framework.