Chi Onwurah – 2015 Parliamentary Question to the Department for Energy and Climate Change

The below Parliamentary question was asked by Chi Onwurah on 2015-11-24.

To ask the Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change, when the decision was made to connect the monitoring and control of the National Grid to the internet; and what risk analysis was undertaken prior to that decision being made.

Andrea Leadsom

Cyber security is one of the Government’s top national security priorities. Whilst National Grid is a private company, DECC is working with them on cyber security, as well as broader issues of security and resilience. We are also working with other industry partners, government departments and agencies, to ensure that the risks to the energy sector are understood and that appropriate mitigations are established.

National Grid has provided the following additional information:

“National Grid’s Information Security programme has, among other steps, advocated a defence in depth strategy by instituting rigid network segmentation and isolation between our business and SCADA [Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition] systems. Further, National Grid policy does not allow for direct connection between external networks and SCADA systems.”