The National Renewable Energy Laboratory has developed a new tool designed to protect distributed energy resources, including solar panels and battery backups, from security and privacy risks.
The DER Risk Manager is an automated application that enables users to navigate and implement the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s Risk Management Framework for distributed energy resources, NREL said Monday.
According to the laboratory, most federal agencies are required to comply with the NIST framework to integrate security and privacy risk management tasks into their information technology systems.
“The seven-step NIST framework is a comprehensive process that helps organizations manage information security and privacy risk, but it wasn’t designed specifically for operational technologies like distributed energy. The DER-RM offers this service for organizations seeking to adopt more renewable and distributed energy systems,” said Tami Reynolds, NREL’s cybersecurity project lead.
The downloadable tool assesses a system’s compliance with the framework by applying common cybersecurity attacks and testing the infrastructure’s defense.
Users can also upload their control data files directly to the application, which will then check the files for NIST compliance and report where risk management steps are needed.
