The report is based on a study conducted by staff at FERC, NERC and NERC regional entities. The study is based on information provided by experts at eight U.S. electric utilities of various sizes and functions, and its goal was to help the industry improve incident response and incident recovery plans, which authors of the study say help ensure the reliability of the bulk electric system in the event of a cybersecurity incident.

The study found that there is no best incident response and recovery (IRR) plan model. The IRR plans of the targeted utilities share many similarities — they are based on the same NIST framework (SP 800-61) — but there are also differences, and some organizations have developed separate plans for incidents impacting their operational and business networks.

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Today, Microsoft is releasing a new annual report, called the Digital Defense Report, covering cybersecurity trends from the past year. This report makes it clear that threat actors have rapidly increased in sophistication over the past year, using techniques that make them harder to spot and that threaten even the savviest targets. For example, nation-state actors are engaging in new reconnaissance techniques that increase their chances of compromising high-value targets, criminal groups targeting businesses have moved their infrastructure to the cloud to hide among legitimate services, and attackers have developed new ways to scour the internet for systems vulnerable to ransomware.

Continue reading: https://blogs.microsoft.com/on-the-issues/2020/09/29/microsoft-digital-defense-report-cyber-threats/

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