CESER Launches CIE Back-to-School Series: A Weekly Deep Dive into CIE Principles

Cybersecurity is a critical priority for energy organizations as cyberattacks continue to evolve in sophistication and frequency. Building and maintaining secure critical infrastructure today requires more than traditional reactive cyber measures. It demands the addition of engineered controls, which use engineering and physics to mitigate cyber risks. 

That is the foundation of Department of Energy’s (DOE) Office of Cybersecurity, Energy Security, and Emergency Response’s (CESER) Cyber-Informed Engineering (CIE) program. CIE guides organizations on how to embed cybersecurity into infrastructure engineering and design, effectively “engineering out” cyber risks by eliminating catastrophic consequences from cyber-enabled attacks. 

CESER and Idaho National Laboratory (INL) are launching the CIE Back-to-School Weekly series that offers an in-depth look at each of CIE's 12 foundational principles. Each week, new content will be added to the new CIE learning hub, giving energy professionals and engineers the opportunity to explore one principle at a time, progressively build understanding, and see how the principles build on one another. The learning hub will provide a principle overview, a case study to demonstrate application, and key questions that engineers can use to begin applying the principle to their organization’s energy systems. Explore the Learning Hub today to learn about Principle 1 (Consequence-Focused Design), and come back weekly to keep building your CIE knowledge. 

CESER partners with INL to build tools and resources that support CIE adoption, including a CIE Implementation Guide to navigate engineers through questions that apply CIE principles, and a web-based CIE Analysis Tool that can track responses to those questions. More tools, workbooks, and resources are available on INL’s CIE knowledge hub.

As a capstone to the CIE Back-to-School Weekly Series, CESER and INL will release the CIE Handbook, a new resource that offers a simplified starting point to CIE adoption and connects users to CIE resources and research. Visit CESER’s CIE webpage for more information on the CIE program.