CAPA's Phil Blythe presents at CSIP-AUS Connect 2025

CAPA's co-founder and Executive Director Phil Blythe delivered an engaging presentation at CSIP-AUS Connect 2025 on Australia’s DER sector, highlighting emerging standards, the new national Cyber Coordinator role, and strengthened protections to manage growing risks to DER assets.

In the presentation, Phil asked the audience a number of important questions;

• How do we know if we are under attack?

• How secure are our communcations?

• How do we coordinate in an attack situation?

• How do we time our mitigations?

In discussing the first question, Phil provided a rundown of the CERby program, and the design of a system-wide Threat Detection and Response architecture that would share detection alert information and escalate an attack to the appropriate jurisdictional authoriities.

On the second issue - for securing our communciations - Phil gave some background on the genus of the CSIP-Aus protocol and its origins, as well as a frank view on the longevity of such a protocol as we move to run over 10 GW of our power system via such a control path.

And on the issue of coordination, an explanation of the DER Cyber Coordinator was discussed, which was a concept that come out of the CERby program and has now been formally defined in the CER Task Force briefing on roles and responsibilities.

But overall, with so many GW of CER being connected, the message was clear - we need to make our systems secure and resilient as the become part of our National critical digital infrastructure.