Month: December 2020

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Protecting the Industrial Cloud from Cyberattacks

Cybersecurity-Protection

EE Times – The cloud and edge computing have come to the industrial world and they’re here to stay. Whether one thinks that’s a good or bad thing, it’s now inevitable.

These shifts have been accelerated by the enormous expansion in remote workers due to Covid-19 and their many unmanaged or insecurely managed devices, along with the connection of millions more imperfectly managed devices via the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT).

While the expansion of cloud services can help solve some cybersecurity problems for industrial companies, including the vastly expanded attack surface caused by remote workers, it also spawns new security problems.

The steady corporate shift to the cloud, data traversing “hostile territory” and the proliferation of networked devices are creating a growing list of data security challenges. We take an in-depth look at the risks and possible solutions in our upcoming Cyber Security Special Project.

In multiple reports from different parts of the cybersecurity industry, data breaches continue to be the top concern in many industries, and flaws in identity and access management (IAM) practices continue to rate among the top avenues for those data breaches.

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Amazon Becomes World’s Largest Corporate Purchaser of Renewable Energy, Advancing its Climate Pledge Commitment to be Net-zero Carbon by 2040

Amazon-Renewable-Energy

EE Online – Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) today (Dec 10) announced 26 new utility-scale wind and solar energy projects totaling 3.4 gigawatts (GW) of electricity production capacity, bringing its total investment in renewable energy in 2020 to 35 projects and more than 4 GW of capacity the largest corporate investment in renewable energy in a single year. These new projects will make Amazon the largest-ever corporate purchaser of renewable energy.

Amazon has now invested in 6.5 GW of wind and solar projects that will enable the company to supply its operations with more than 18 million megawatt hours (MWh) of renewable energy annually. This is enough to power 1.7 million U.S. homes for one year. These projects will supply renewable energy for Amazon’s corporate offices, fulfillment centers, and Amazon Web Services (AWS) data centers that support millions of customers globally. They will also help advance Amazon’s goal to reach net-zero carbon emissions across its business by 2040. Part of that commitment is powering Amazon’s infrastructure with 100% renewable energy, and the company is now on a path to achieve this milestone by 2025, five years ahead of the initial 2030 target.

“Amazon is helping fight climate change by moving quickly to power our businesses with renewable energy,” said Jeff Bezos, Amazon founder and CEO. “With a total of 127 solar and wind projects, Amazon is now the biggest corporate buyer of renewable energy ever. We are on a path to running 100% of our business on renewable energy by 2025 five years ahead of our original target of 2030. This is just one of the many steps we’re taking that will help us meet our Climate Pledge. I couldn’t be more proud of all the teams across Amazon that continue to work hard, smart, and fast to get these projects up and running.”

The 26 new wind and solar projects announced today are located in Australia, France, Germany, Italy, South Africa, Sweden, the U.K., and the U.S. The new projects are Amazon’s first in France, Germany, Italy, and South Africa. In the U.S., Amazon has now enabled wind and solar projects in California, Delaware, Illinois, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Nebraska, North Carolina, Ohio, Texas, and Virginia. Amazon has a total of 127 renewable energy projects globally, including 59 utility-scale wind and solar renewable energy projects and 68 solar rooftops on fulfillment centers and sort centers around the globe.

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Major Advances with Motor Control Centers (MCCs)

Motor Control Center
MCCs are most widely used in the utilities, manufacturing, industrial, and large commercial industries that operate machinery and motors. MCCs offer enormous flexibility across differing industries and are suitable for many applications, such as: utilities, communications, oil, gas, chemical, pulp, paper, water, waste, mining, metals, industrial production, and mass-production manufacturing. MCCs are used to house various power distribution equipment and controls such as: main distribution panels (MDPs), main circuit breakers (MCBs), protective relaying, transformers, load centers, panelboards, etc. 
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First Hybrid-Electric Plane Takes Flight Over Maui

Hybrid-Electric-Plane

The Honolulu Star-Advertiser – In a demonstration flight, the Electric EEL flew from Maui’s airport to Hana and back entirely on a single hybrid-electric charge. The company says the plane is like a Prius in the sky, and it’s the first of its kind. For the first time, a hybrid-electric plane has taken to the skies above Maui.

Ampaire Inc., a Los Angeles-based company focused on electric aviation, conducted its first, 20-minute demonstration flight in its Electric EEL—a hybrid-electric plane — from Maui’s Kahului Airport to Hana and back on Nov. 22 on a single charge.

Ampaire said it is the first to complete a demonstration flight of a hybrid-electric aircraft along an actual airline route. Ampaire is now flying the route regularly as part of a one-month demonstration program in partnership with Mokulele Airlines. Mokulele is one of 15 airlines around the world that signed a letter of interest with the company.

“We’re following the successful path of hybrid-electric automobiles in transforming ground transportation by taking that model to the sky, ” said Ampaire CEO Kevin Noertker in a news release. “By upgrading current aircraft with hybrid-electric propulsion we can enter the market quickly and take advantage of existing infrastructure for fixed-wing aviation.”

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World carbon dioxide emissions drop 7% in pandemic-hit 2020

Climate-Change

Associated Press – A locked-down pandemic-struck world cut its carbon dioxide emissions this year by 7%, the biggest drop ever, new preliminary figures show.

The Global Carbon Project, an authoritative group of dozens of international scientists who track emissions, calculated that the world will have put 37 billion U.S. tons (34 billion metric tons) of carbon dioxide in the air in 2020. That’s down from 40.1 billion US tons (36.4 billion metric tons) in 2019, according a study published Thursday in the journal Earth System Science Data.

Scientists say this drop is chiefly because people are staying home, traveling less by car and plane, and that emissions are expected to jump back up after the pandemic ends. Ground transportation makes up about one-fifth of emissions of carbon dioxide, the chief man-made heat-trapping gas.

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Why The Healthcare Sector Must Demand Real Cybersecurity Change

Cyber-threats-to-healthcare

Forbes – Managing Director of Technology at Health2047 with a comprehensive understanding of the digital transformation of health care IT. We should be outraged and deserve better. 

In late October of this year, a joint cybersecurity advisory from the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) warned of an uptick in ransomware activity targeting the healthcare and public health (HPH) sector, specifically hospitals and healthcare providers.

The advisory came just over a month after reports out of Germany documented the first patient death directly tied to a hospital ransomware attack. That’s right: The healthcare cybersecurity situation has now become a matter of life and death.

Healthcare cybercrime such as ransomware is especially egregious during a pandemic, as illustrated by Bitdefender data (via Security Boulevard). But it is now sadly all too commonplace. Also far too commonplace is the seeming inattention and inaction in the face of rising threats.

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