We are thrilled to announce that Digital Bond was one of five companies selected for negotiation of awards of up to $7.9 million in DOE funding to develop and integrate technologically advanced controls and cyber-security devices into our electric grid and energy infrastructure. Our project is titled Cyber Security Audit and Attack Detection Toolkit and includes $1.1M of funding.
The size of this contract will allow us to put some serious research resources on our efforts to add control system security intelligence to existing systems and applications. Our previous results have been from research contracts of less than $100K, so you should expect significant results from this work. The good news is the results will be made available to site subscribers at the low, low price of $100/year.
We wanted to maximize the impact of the research results so we partnered with market leaders. OSIsoft, the manufacturer of the PI server, and Tenable Network Security, the maker of the Nessus Vulnerability Scanner and Security Center, are key participants in our project as are three large electric transmission companies who will test and implement the results. We knew we were on to useful research when we had multiple asset owners highly interested in participating and getting the results.
Even though the work will be initially developed and tested with these market leading systems, we will also be generalizing the tools and testing with other products as part of the project. This will all make sense when you see the details.
Next week we will post the Project Narrative which goes into detail on the project, and we will be blogging on the project significantly, with the appropriate approvals, over the next two years.
Congratulations to the others awarded contracts EnerNex, SEL, Siemens and SRI. I look forward to learning more about their projects.