NYPA using Virginia firm’s product to defend key supply-chain partners

The New York Power Authority (NYPA) is using a Virginia cybersecurity firm’s product as it works to “secure the state of New York’s public-energy ecosystem.”

IronNet, Inc. (NYSE:IRNT) on Jan. 13 announced its expanded partnership with NYPA, the nation’s largest state public-power organization. IronNet is a McLean, Virginia–based firm that says it works at “transforming cybersecurity through collective defense.”

Supported by Amazon Web Services (AWS), NYPA’s adoption of IronNet’s Collective Defense product will enable New York municipal utilities, partners, and other relevant critical infrastructure state agencies to create a “dynamic, radar-like view of the attack landscape that provides visibility into a wider and deeper range of threats” across the state’s entire power grid, the company contended in a release.

Based on IronNet’s proprietary machine learning and artificial intelligence, the cloud-based cybersecurity product will provide collective-defense capabilities to NYPA and its key supply-chain partners to “strengthen the state’s ability to protect the grid through a unified cyber-defense strategy.”

“In the same way that utilities band together to provide mutual aid after damaging weather events, NYPA is making collaborative responses to cyberattacks possible,” Bill Welch, co-CEO of IronNet, said. “We are proud to work with NYPA to enable all public utility stakeholders to adopt a proactive defense against any cyber adversary with an eye on the grid — from criminal groups to nation-states.”

Powered by a network detection and response (or NDR) system that tracks network anomalies with behavioral analytics, NYPA’s key supply-chain partners can use IronNet’s collective-defense platform to “collaborate in real time to better detect and defend against attacks,” per the IronNet release. This approach “further enhances the resilience” of New York’s grid amidst the “escalating prevalence of attacks on U.S. critical infrastructure.” 

“Given the rise of sophisticated cyberattacks, we need to help our municipal utilities implement a strong security program that can detect and mitigate attacks in real-time,” Victor Costanza, deputy chief information security officer at the New York Power Authority, said. “With the technologies provided by IronNet and AWS, the [information technology (IT)] and power infrastructures in NYPA’s supply-chain ecosystem can collect and share anonymized cyber-threat information so we can defend our enterprise networks collectively, raising the security posture of all of us throughout the state.”

Following the success of an initial pilot with five NYPA municipalities, the announcement of the expanded partnership will enable the remaining utility companies included in the NYPA supply chain to leverage IronNet’s advanced-threat detection capabilities as part of the NYPA collective-defense community. 

Defenders of the state’s IT and power infrastructure will receive alerts on anomalous network behaviors correlated with other collective-defense participants from the U.S. energy sector at large. 

In the event of a coordinated attack, the community also benefits from expert guidance from the top cybersecurity professionals of IronNet’s security-operations center, the company said.