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Adam Bannister is a contributor to IFSEC Global, having been in the role of Editor from 2014 through to November 2019. Adam also had stints as a journalist at cybersecurity publication, The Daily Swig, and as Managing Editor at Dynamis Online Media Group.
September 2, 2014

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Vulnerable Utilities Infrastructure Needs Perimeter Intrusion Detection

Senstar will showcase their perimeter intrusion detection solutions at IFSEC Southeast Asia

IFSEC SEARegister to visit IFSEC Southeast Asia 2014 now.

When: 3-5 September 2014
Where: Kuala Lumpur Convention Centre, Malaysia

Sensor-driven perimeter protection has come of age, Gord Loney, VP of product sales at Senstar, tells IFSEC Global.

The former Canadian Air Force Lieutenant Colonel, who is speaking at IFSEC Southeast Asia – which takes place between 3-5 September – says utilities around the world are often poorly protected and vulnerable to terror attack.

IFSEC Global.com: Hello Gord. Please tell us a little about your company, Senstar and what you’ll be talking about at IFSEC Southeast Asia?

Gord Loney: Perimeter protection is traditionally used in the military and other high level applications.

However, there is increasing appreciation of the vulnerability of what we call the remote unattended sites – like substations, pumping stations, pipe lines or gas utilities.  There are hundreds of thousands of these sites around the world, most with little more than a rusting fence.
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And yet what these sites contain is critical to the way of life we have all come to expect.  It’s surprising how little damage needs to be done to the electrical grid could cause over a wide area.

So we’re starting to see an investment in protecting these sites.

It is a tough problem – not just having the sensors and cameras, but also the response.  We’re seeing what I would almost call an experiment in that around the world a lot of countries are trying to harden these sites.

But it doesn’t matter how much concrete and steel you erect, you can build the fences higher, thicker, stronger, but if someone wants to get in, they still can get in, unless you can detect the attack and respond to it.

So it is a really tough problem, which is the focus of my talk.

IG: So tell us a bit more about your perimeter protection product…

GL: One of the big issues of outdoor sensors is how do you handle the inevitable false alarms.

Firstly the most important thing is to minimise them, which you do by searching and collecting the right sensors.

So part of my talk will be talking about sensor selection.  But many sensors require adjustment as things change.

For instance, a very common, cost-effective sensor is a vibration sensor.  When someone climbs a fence, the fence vibrates.

However, a fence, a typical chain length, welded meshed fence that most of us are familiar with, does not stay the same as it ages. A chain fence relaxes, it’s mechanical properties change.

Vegetation encroaches on the fence, changing its characteristics.

Historically, to compensate for those changes maintenance people would visit the site – for example, a prison – and adjust the sensors’ sensitivity settings.  That is almost impractical for the utilities.

Singapore Power Grid, for instance, has 130 substations.  It’s very expensive to keep on top of this – you have to visit every site and manually change the settings.

We highly recommend that customers leverage their investment in communications infrastructure to network their sites. We can actually speak to the sensor, so technicians at a maintenance station hundreds of kilometres away can maintain hundreds of sites remotely.

Of course, the other way to manage the alarms is to use cameras. Many end users think that cameras are a detection system; in reality they’re not.

About three years ago someone climbed into the wheel well on board a Singapore Airline flight in KL [Kuala Lumpur] but wasn’t discovered until they landed in Singapore.

KL Airport had hundreds of cameras but it took them a week to trawl the cameras and discover how the guy did this.  So cameras are a tool for assessing a situation when a sensor signals a problem

We have quite a lot of experience in analytics. A lot of end users take their answers from video analytics, which are fabulous in indoor environments. But put them in an outdoor environment and the technology is just not up to the task.  There are far too many false alarms.

IG: So you think the utilities are dangerously unprotected then? That they have only physical barriers?

GL: Or nothing at all. You know, it’s very much like 9/11.  We’re very good, the human race, at ignoring problems.

But some jurisdictions are paying attention.  There are many, shall we say, experiments going on.

We’ve been in the business for 35 years and we now have the technology and expertise to be part of the solution.

But technology by itself does not provide security; you have to balance technology and human resources. That’s part of the message I’m trying to get out.

IG: How hard is it too convince prospective customers that your solutions is more cost effective than a traditional combination of guards and perimeter fences?

GL: It’s just not practical to cover such large sites with only guards, even in third-world countries where labour is cheap. There may be guards but typically only at the very large sub stations.

And humans aren’t as vigilant as sensors.

I’ve often thought that the very highest security threat, like nuclear power and nuclear weapons, because they have guards and their standards are so high, they actually don’t need such a good system, in a perverse way, as commercial businesses.

The tolerance for nuisance alarms in the commercial sectors is almost non-existent.  So they have lower budgets but they actually have higher needs, because they have limited resources, so when they want to send a guard to a substation hundreds of kilometres away it pretty much has to be a valid alarm.

This technology has really matured in the last 40 years, getting better and cheaper.

IG: If the technology’s getting cheaper it makes your job easier…

GL: Well yes, it is becoming more cost effective and government’s are starting to classify the grid, the energy sector, as critical.

However, because it’s usually in private hands, governments are loathe to be prescriptive to industry because then by implication they incur an obligation to fund it.

So in a democracy it is hard for a government to tell a private concern that they must have a certain level of protection.

IG: What about water assets like reservoirs? Is there much of a market there?

GL: That is a very tough problem, particularly reservoirs, although – and I’m not a chemical engineer or biological warfare expert – I think it takes a lot of poison to pollute an entire reservoir and the sheer cost is a barrier.  We seldom see reservoirs being attacked, but pumping stations or treatment plants where they add chlorine – that water is going directly into taps.

Someone is probably not going to put a high security system with cameras, sensors and moving patrols around a lake.  But at the inlet, towards the treatment plant, we are starting to see those get protected.

IG: Going back to IFSEC Southeast Asia, what do you hope to achieve from the event as a company?

GL: We’re trying to create awareness that there are cost-effective, workable, outdoor security solutions on the market.

There are more than 100 manufacturers, believe it or not, in our market.  Many are no bigger than two men in a garage and a website.

There are probably only four or five substantial, ISO-qualified companies, so the market is very fragmented and quite small. The camera market, on the other hand, is huge.

So in my 20 years in this business I’ve seen a lot of failures.  It is just applying  the right product or the one product for the application.  So I think a lot of people have come to the conclusion that it can’t be done.

IG: How much of a presence do you have in the Southeast Asian region?

GL: We’re now the largest company with 15 or 16 different technologies. We’ve been in the business for 35 years, so we’re relatively new to the Asian market.

We opened an office in Singapore three years ago and one in Malaysia this year, so we are using this show to reach out to the local market.

IG: What does the term ‘safe cities’ mean to you?

GL: It’s primarily about video surveillance, but with the potential to expand to include matching sensors to critical points of infrastructure within the safe city.

Most people think of a ‘safe city’ as a wide area of surveillance.  The City of London has more cameras per square kilometre than any other place in Europe.

But I think the safe city’s next evolution is to actually put sensors on key infrastructure and integrate them with cameras.

IG: So the sensor market is very much in its infancy compared to video surveillance. The growth potential is enormous. Thanks for your time, Gord – good luck at the show.

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