Blue Ridge’s LinkGuard CyberCloak capabilities defend against external threats in DOE/NREL testing

September 17, 2023

The U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) National Renewable Energy Lab (NREL) selected Blue Ridge Networks’ LinkGuard cybersecurity solution to be tested in the Clean Energy Cybersecurity Accelerator (CECA) Cohort 1. The company gained professional evaluation experience in a realistic environment against some of the most urgent cybersecurity challenges facing the modern energy grid.

It was one of only three companies selected from numerous applicants for this rigorous months-long evaluation. CECA is sponsored by DOE’s Office of Cybersecurity, Energy Security, and Emergency Response (CESER), in collaboration with the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy and utility partners. The program is managed by NREL.

“The testing and results are particularly timely, given the recent alert issued by the U.S. National Security Agency on recent attacks to critical infrastructures (attributed to a nation-state actor), and reported by resources such as Reuters, MSN, and others,” John Higginbotham, CEO of Blue Ridge, said in a Tuesday media statement.

The statement added that the company “would like to thank DOE and NREL for the opportunity to demonstrate the effectiveness of our LinkGuard solution and Berkshire Hathaway Energy, Duke Energy, and Xcel Energy for sponsoring the technical assessment.”

“The testing validates our LinkGuard CyberCloak capabilities can prevent an outside attack and confirms the benefits that our federal and commercial customers have been realizing for several years,” according to Mark Palomba, Blue Ridge’s chief commercial officer.

The purpose of this testing was to evaluate the effectiveness and efficiency of LinkGuard against a chosen set of threats to protect operational technology (OT) network infrastructure for the energy sector, particularly with respect to its unique authentication methodologies.

LinkGuard effectiveness was evaluated utilizing an NREL test network that includes a primary SCADA (supervisory control and data acquisition) control center network, an enterprise network, several substation networks, a remote management network, and an external attacker network. The test results assessed LinkGuard’s CyberCloak capabilities and demonstrated it stopping an external attacker’s initial access attempt of using remote services during an emulated kill chain.

The capabilities of the LinkGuard CyberCloak have ‘successfully’ defended against outside agent attacks and can be an essential component of a cybersecurity network segmentation strategy. Blue Ridge has other products and solutions that can be added to enhance LinkGuard utilization as part of an overall cyber security strategy. As analog technology is replaced by digital, and OT environments become more visible, it is critical to deploy solutions that limit visibility. LinkGuard CyberCloak capabilities do just that.

Last month, Blue Ridge was recognized by analyst firm Gartner as a trusted provider of solutions to secure OT cyber physical systems. Blue Ridge has received four recognitions including ‘Top Vendor for Protection of Cyber Physical Systems (CPS),’ ‘OT Security for Oil and Gas Industry,’ ‘OT Security for Manufacturing Operations, and ‘Overall OT Security Management.’