Industrial Control System Security for Municipalities – an ICS-ISAC February Briefing

Feb. 17, 2013 - PRLog -- During the February 20th ICS-ISAC Member Briefing Miki Calero, Chief Security Officer for the City of Columbus Ohio, will provide a first-hand assessment of the challenges and opportunities presented to those responsible for securing municipal infrastructures.

In addition, Industrial Control System Information Sharing and Analysis Center (ICS-ISAC) Chair Chris Blask will brief Members on new developments at the Center.

Industrial Control System Security for Municipalities
February 20, 2013  •  1pm ET
Register on the ICS-ISAC website: http://ics-isac.org/

Miki Calero, Chief Security Officer (CSO) for the City of Columbus Ohio established the City’s Enterprise Security Risk Management program that protects the 15th largest metropolitan cyber and communications infrastructure in the United States. The City is responsible for providing water; electric distribution; emergency, building, and traffic management; as well as other infrastructure services to a population of approximately 800,000 residents.

With his 23 years of leadership experience across the public and private sectors, Mr. Calero’s responsibilities have included protection of information systems, physical assets, and critical infrastructure in strategic, tactical, and operational capacities.  His extensive experience coupled with his dedication to cybersecurity issues has earned him several awards and much recognition.  

Under his outstanding program leadership the City of Columbus is being acknowledged by CSO Magazine with its CSO40 Award in recognition as a security project and initiative that demonstrates exceptional business value and thought leadership.  

In addition, in 2012, Mr. Calero was named one of The Most Influential People in Security by Security Magazine for his vision of the convergence of the physical and cybersecurity domains. He relentlessly promotes this holistic approach to security as a frequent speaker at national events and as a writer for security publications.

He is a US Army Major as well as an aviator and earned his Bachelor of Science in Aviation Technology and a Master of Arts in Computer Resources and Information Management.  In addition, he has earned industry designations as a Certified Information Security Manager (CISM) and a Project Management Professional (PMP).

Chris Blask, Chair of the Industrial Control System Information Sharing and Analysis Center (ICS-ISAC), has a career that spans the breadth of the industrial cybersecurity space.

In 1990 he was working at General Electric Power Systems as a control systems engineer but soon joined Sea Change Corporation (1991) where he invented one of the first commercial firewall products, the BorderWare Firewall Server.

After that, he joined Cisco System (1998) where he led the company’s firewall business to a position of global leadership, a legacy that continues to this day. Building on the success at Cisco, he and several Cisco colleagues started Protego Networks (2002), an early Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) vendor that was later acquired by Cisco.

His career success continued with the founding of Lofty Perch (2005) an organization dedicated to investigating the application of SIEM technologies to industrial control system (ICS) cybersecurity.  His devotion to cybersecurity continues through ongoing advocacy for the development of such architectures.

Subsequent years found him at NSS Labs developing regulatory compliance testing regimes (2008); creating AlienVault's Industrial Control Systems Group (2011); and, based on his years of firsthand experience, authoring the first book on SIEM, "Security Information and Event Management Implementation", (McGraw Hill, 2010).

Today Mr. Blask is Founder and CEO of ICS Cybersecurity, Inc.; Chair of the Industrial Control System Information Sharing and Analysis Center (ICS-ISAC); Chief Architect for NorthWind Technologies in Doha, Qatar; Advisor to Itex Solutions in Sana’a, Yemen and to Targetproof in Atlanta, Georgia (USA).  In addition, he is actively involved with a wide range of industry efforts both in the United States and abroad.

The Industrial Control System Information Sharing and Analysis Center (ICS-ISAC) exists to bring together the private sector partners and stakeholders for the purpose of sharing knowledge about risks, threats and best practices across our shared critical infrastructure. The Center was created to provide the ICS community with a common platform where collaboration can be performed in an environment best suited to the needs of all involved parties.

A member driven organization, the ICS-ISAC is supported by valued industry partners including City of Columbus (Ohio), Emerging Threats, Exelon, IBM, McAfee, n-Dimension, Palantir, SAIC, SISCO, and UtiliSec.

Interested organizations, researchers, vendors, and asset owners can join the ICS-ISAC at http://ics-isac.org

POC – Debbie Windle  •  979-204-7218  •  dwindle@ics-isac.org