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The 2014 Industrial Control System (ICS) Cyber Security Conference will be held October 20 – 23, 2014 at the Georgia Tech Hotel and Conference Center in Atlanta, Georgia, USA.

As the longest-running cyber security-focused conference for the industrial control systems sector, the event will cater to the energy, utility, chemical, transportation, manufacturing, and other industrial and critical infrastructure organizations.

The conference will address topics covering ICSs, including protection for SCADA systems, plant control systems, engineering workstations, substation equipment, programmable logic controllers (PLCs), and other field control system devices.

“The IT community and ICS community are now bridging the security gap,” said Joe Weiss, founder of the ICS Cybersecurity Conference, which was recently acquired bySecurityWeek. “The value to attendees at the ICS Cybersecurity Conference is inherent with the robust exchange of technical information, actual incidents, insights and best practices to help protect critical infrastructures from cyber attacks.”

“It has become paramount that critical infrastructures balance the needs of ICS reliability and safety with cyber security,” Weiss added.

The Conference is unique as it focuses on control system end-users from various industries and what cyber vulnerabilities mean to control system reliability and safe operation. It also has a history of having discussions of actual ICS cyber incidents.

Bigger and better than ever before, select sessions of interest will include:

• A summary and status of the two utilities performing Aurora hardware mitigation projects in conjunction with the Department of Defense (DOD)

• A summary and status of the two utility ICS cyber security test beds (the equipment is the same as in water, oil/gas, pipelines, chemicals, etc.)

• A summary and status of the DOD ICS cyber security test bed

• A summary of the recovery and remediation actions from one the most significant ICS cyber incidents to date – complete loss of DCS logic with plants at power

• A summary of Project Shine findings

• Discussions of recent non-North American ICS cyber incidents

As with previous ICS Cyber Security Conferences, the agenda will not be complete until shortly before the conference to accommodate the most current issues and findings.

The industrial infrastructure sector’s need for remote access and adoption of Internet-facing technologies have created significant vulnerabilities that must be addressed. In the extraordinarily broad world of cyber systems, the critical industrial infrastructure sector has had more than its fair share of unintentional cyber incidents as well as cyber attacks.

To date, unintentional cyber incidents and actual cyber attacks have resulted in multiple deaths and hundreds of millions of dollars in damages across almost all industrial sectors worldwide.

The only way to address the ICS cyber security problem is to join the strengths of the ICS community’s domain knowledge and the IT community’s cyber security knowledge.

Online registration will be available this week along with a call for papers. For conference registration and sponsorship information please contact SecurityWeek.