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Texas A&M student team shines in DOE CyberForce Competition

Posted on December 13, 2019 by anthonyteo

Department of Energy CyberForce Competition

A team of students from Texas A&M University placed 10th in the nation out of 108 teams at the Nov. 16 Department of Energy (DOE) CyberForce Competition™, which is a cyber workforce development competition that focuses on the defensive/hardening nature of energy cyber infrastructure.

The DOE partnered with current national laboratory staff that has successfully hosted four successful cyber defense competitions to exercise interactive, scenario-based events to create this competition. The national labs that hosted were Argonne National Laboratory, Brookhaven National Laboratory, Idaho National Laboratory, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, National Energy Technology Laboratory, National Renewable Energy Laboratory, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and Sandia National Laboratory, which is the location at which the Texas A&M team participated.

Grant opens doors for Texas A&M researchers to explore safety, security in nation’s energy industry

Posted on July 26, 2019 by Aditya Deshpande

Image: The Battalion

Kate Davis, an assistant professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, leads a team from the Engineering Experiment Station, which will be undertaking one of the cybersecurity projects in Aggieland.

Davis is no stranger to projects involving national cybersecurity. She came to Aggieland after working on a project called CYPSA — Cyber-Physical Situational Awareness. Davis said reflecting on that experience from CYPSA launched her into what is now her biggest project yet.

“For this new project, the idea is to come up with a next-generation cyber-physical energy management system that is considering security from the ground up,” Davis said. “The CYPSA project provided a seed for that.”

Davis said her team’s primary goal is to improve cybersecurity and safety for energy industries in the U.S., protecting important infrastructure across the nation.

TEES team is developing next phase of cyber security for US energy

Posted on February 4, 2019 by anthonyteo

Illustration by Anne Fu, Research Communications and Public Relations

With federal funding, a project team from the Texas A&M Engineering Experiment Station (TEES) intends to develop a next-generation secure energy management system that can detect malicious and abnormal events with a combination of cyber and physical data and algorithms, effective integrated analytics, and visualization.

Kate Davis, assistant professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Texas A&M University, leads the team, which includes project members from Pacific Northwest National Laboratory; Sandia National Laboratory; Sekurity; the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign; and Vistra Energy.

The nation’s energy infrastructure has become a major target of cyberattacks over the past decade, with more frequent and sophisticated attacks on the rise. Today, a cyber incident has the potential to disrupt energy services, damage highly specialized equipment, and threaten human health and safety. This makes energy cybersecurity a top national priority that will require the federal government and the energy sector to work together to reduce cyber risks that could trigger a large-scale or prolonged energy disruption.

To address this priority, the US Department of Energy recently announced awards of up to $28 million to support the research, development and demonstration of next-generation tools and technologies to improve the cybersecurity and resilience of the nation’s critical energy infrastructure, including the electric grid and oil and natural gas infrastructure.