On 13 July 2023 The CyberDiplomat delivered a guest presentation, “SCADA / Cyber Diplomacy”, at the William J. Perry Center for Hemispheric Defense Studies, National Defense University, in Washington, DC.
The session formed part of the Center’s course Cybersecurity Policy in the Americas: Challenges for Policy-Strategic Analysis (CYBER 2023), which ran from 10 to 21 July 2023 with participants drawn from across the Western Hemisphere.
SCADA meets diplomacy
SCADA systems — the supervisory control and data acquisition systems that run power grids, water utilities, pipelines and ports — are where cybersecurity stops being about data and starts being about electricity, water and fuel.
Two things follow from that, and they were the heart of the presentation. First, these systems were built for reliability and long service lives, not for a networked world, which makes defending them a different discipline from corporate IT security. Second, an attack on them is a matter of state: it triggers questions of attribution, of international norms, of what a proportionate response looks like, and of how neighbouring countries help each other when the lights go out.
The moment a cyber incident affects a power grid, it stops being an IT matter and becomes a foreign-policy one.
A note of recognition
Following the course, the Center’s Director, Dr Paul J. Angelo, wrote to acknowledge the contribution to the professional and intellectual development of participants from across the hemisphere, on behalf of course director Dr Boris Saavedra and deputy director Prof. Celina Realuyo.
It was a privilege to contribute, and it continues a relationship that began with training government and banking officials in Panama the previous year.
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