Class 607 Week 5

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Class 607 Week 5

After conducting a red team analysis of a local power plant based on what we understood from the red team handbook by TRADOC G2 Operational Environment Enterprise (2015), we identified three vulnerabilities that jumped out at us. One of these is the aging of the workforce. Aging means losing expertise, which translates to less reliability of the power system and augmented susceptibility to external threats such as disruption by natural phenomena and terrorist-related intrusions. The second vulnerability is security threats instigated by insiders. Contractors and employees of this local power plant who have authentic reasons for accessing the systems can change their motives and end up doing great harm to the systems by damaging physical assets and the entire power plant. The third is the lack of preinstalled physical tamper detection hardware to shield transmission systems and towers, transformers, control centers, and fuel delivery systems from internal and external tampering.

The aspects of the operations in this power plant that we might seek to exploit include automation errors by maintenance and control room workers. The operators in this power plant can improve their current security posture by redesigning systems and procedures for error detection and avoidance, augmenting surveillance, and implementing better error detection and correction training. The process we used to get to the results of our analysis was consistent with what we learned from the red teaming text, and it entailed three steps. The first of these steps included putting ourselves in the circumstances of a potential adversary and reacting to external stimuli as if it were a real-life situation. The second was to develop some first-person questions that the potential adversary would ask regarding the ensuing circumstances. The last step was to develop decisions and recommendations on the next course of action.

References

TRADOC G2 Operational Environment Enterprise (2015). The applied critical thinking handbook Vol. 7.0. Leavenworth, Kansas. University of Foreign Military and Cultural Studies.