In the U.S., on March 15, President Joe Biden signed a $1.5 trillion omnibus spending bill that requires critical infrastructure providers and federal agencies  to promptly report cyberattacks to the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA). Not knowing you’ve been hacked is no longer a free pass to avoid reporting that you’ve been hacked. It’s more likely the ticket to large fines and bad press — both undesirable side effects that can be avoided through the visibility that test access points (TAPs) provide.

Grid modernization has created an explosion of network-connected equipment, exposing utilities to a wide range of potential threats from nation states, criminals, disgruntled employees, and accidental misconfiguration (which happens far more often than you may think). These new network connections from supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) equipment and others exposes previously air gapped industrial control systems to the internet … and hackers.