March - 20198GOVERNMENT CIO OUTLOOKIN MYOPINIONSecuring Critical Infrastructure with Artificial Intelligencet was 2011; a year that may be considered the beginning of IT/OT convergence. LTE was the new technology on the block; touting fast ethernet speeds from almost anywhere. Machine to Machine (M2M) communications between industrial control system (ICS) devices was becoming a cost effective way to improve the reliability, redundancy, and operational timeliness of the nations' critical infrastructure. To pave the way for this radical change, the way devices responsible for controlling electric, gas, and water commodities communicate, an even more radical change of the status quo was required; the merging of the traditionally separate information technology and operational technology paradigms. Traditionally, operational technology was physically air gapped from the internet. Often ICS devices lived on their own network (OT), completely separate of the corporate's network (IT). This physical separation was intentional. OT systems are antiquated, often using technology that is far behind their IT counterparts. Their lack of recent technology was often due to the "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" approach. OT systems require slow, steady reliability, and uptime is far more important than the latest way to move or view data. With a tradition of air-gapping, and running decades old technology, cyber-security was never a priority in the OT realm. That is of course until the convergence with IT began, and the difficulty of protecting our critical infrastructure became that much more problematic.It is often said that the next major war won't be fought on the battlefield, but within the cyber world. Hospitals, banks, and critical infrastructure are the first targets a nation state will attack. You disable these three industries, and you will have crippled the country. Hospitals and banks have taken cyber-security seriously for years; even decades. Critical infrastructure, on the other hand, has been far behind; mostly due to this traditional separation of IT and OT.IIan Fitzgerald, CIO, Truckee Donner Public Utility DistrictByUsing artificial intelligence (AI) or machine learning to determine network baselines, even as those baselines shift, allows CIOs to identify model breaches based on abnormal user behaviorIan Fitzgerald
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