Avangrid wins industry award for cybersecurity innovation
Avangrid has been named a 2023 Top Innovator by Public Utilities Fortnightly, a leading industry association.
Avangrid earned the Lewis Latimer Top Innovator in Design Award for its Cyber Security Simulation in Metaverse project. The project created cybersecurity simulations to help the team update and improve its proactive defense strategies.
“We’re always exploring how innovative and disruptive technologies like the metaverse can be applied to solve our most critical business challenges—such as how we prepare and respond to system emergencies,” Avangrid CEO Pedro Azagra said. “I’m very happy to see this project earning recognition as I think it’s a great example of where this technology can go. As we think about the future, the metaverse environment will provide opportunity to simulate real world spaces and enable hands on experiences for our workers and stakeholders, all for the benefit of our customers.”
The project involved three interconnected virtual meta-worlds: an electrical substation, the electrical control center, and a virtual cyber security collaboration meeting room.
These three detailed meta-worlds included everything from overhead lines and transformers to an interactive control room. The pilot project then simulated cyber-attacks in the meta-worlds, like one that resulted in a fire at a substation that caused power outages. The Avangrid security team ran through these simulations using a virtual reality platform to identify, respond to, and mitigate or eliminate the cyber threat.
“Imagine you hear an explosion, alarms are going off and there are employees scrambling to respond—what do you do?” Carl Young, chief information officer at Avangrid, said. “This scenario is almost impossible to simulate in the real-world, but in the metaverse we can replay it over and over in a safe and controlled environment. This simulation can help us predict adversaries’ behaviors and tactics as well as understand the impact on our infrastructure and the effectiveness of our processes and plans to mitigate and address these risks.”
Young was among the Avangrid team members who will be honored by Public Utilities Fortnightly. The others are Mansur Mohammed, Robert Antonellis, James Fox, Crispin Gathuru, Jada Pinto, and Ummi Rahman.
