parkerVM600Mk2 A Second-Generation Architecture for a New Era

remote facilities – such as offshore 

platforms – where remote access to

data was in highest demand.

For years, they had led the way

in the defining the features and

functions required of condition

monitoring and machinery 

protection platforms because their 

processes were often worth millions

of dollars per hour and machinery 

failures were potentially so costly.

As such, they were the ones with

the most sophisticated needs and 

the deepest pockets to address

those needs. 

But then, the world began to

shift as the most pressing needs 

began to fall within the power

generation sector along with

corresponding expenditures to 

ensure cybersecurity therein.

Where a cyberattack might be

able to bring down a single

petrochemical facility, a similar 

attack could potentially bring down

major portions of the electrical

grid in a country, affecting tens of 

millions of people for days. 

The Northeast blackout of 20034

, 

for example, left 55 million 

people in the US and Canada 

without power – some for as long

as two weeks. A similar event

in Europe just a few months

later left 56 million people in 

Italy and Switzerland without

power5

. Moving to the southern 

hemisphere, a 1999 event in Brazil

lasted more than three months and 

impacted 97 million people. And 

a 2012 blackout event in India7

affected more than half a billion 

people for two days. The point

here is that cyber vulnerabilities 

in the power generation sector

are particularly serious because 

they may not necessarily 

isolate themselves to a single 

facility; because the generation, 

transmission, and distribution 

infrastructure is interconnected 

via a grid, an attack can impact

huge portions of the electrical 

grid for days, weeks, or months at

a time. This also impacts critical 

infrastructure such as hospitals, 

law enforcement, banking, water

utilities, grocery stores, petrol 

stations, and other entities that 

depend on electrical power to

deliver vital goods and services. 

The stakes are indeed exceedingly

high.

Coupled with the realization that

an attack on the power grid had

such devastating implications, 

industry began to face the reality 

that cyberattacks were not just able

to exploit conventional computer 

systems – they could exploit 

industrial control and automation 

platforms such as SCADA systems 

and PLCs. In 2007, the Aurora 

Generator Test8

 conducted by 

Idaho National Labs demonstrated

that it was possible to compromise

a protective system via the 

internet and thereby destroy a 

diesel generator within a mere 3

minutes. Several years later, the 

Stuxnet9 worm showed the world

that an industrial cyberattack was

no longer just hypothetical – it had

actually been accomplished. Iran’s

nuclear program was sabotaged by

Stuxnet-infected PLCs, destroying 

the enrichment centrifuges they 

controlled by sending them into 

overspeed conditions. 

All of this is to underscore that 

cybersecurity moved from not 

even being on customers’ radar a

mere 15 years prior, to being their 

number one concern by 2015. 

While the VM600 had unwittingly

addressed a portion of these 

concerns by entirely segregating 

the protection functions from the 

condition monitoring functions, 

there were other aspects of the

system that represented cyber 

vulnerabilities – vulnerabilities that 

would require a new generation of

modules.

4 “Technical Analysis of the 

August 14, 2003, Blackout: What

Happened, Why, and What Did We 

Learn?”. North American Electric

Reliability Council. July 13, 2004.

Retrieved September 18, 2021.

5 “Report on the blackout in Italy on

28 September 2003” Swiss Federal

Office of Energy. November 2003. 6 “Wide Power Failure Strikes

Southern Brazil”. The New York

Times. March 12, 1999. Retrieved 

September 18, 2021.

7 “India blackouts leave 700 million

without power”. The Guardian. July

31, 2012. Retrieved September 18, 

2021.

8. “U.S. video shows hacker hit

on power grid”. USA Today.

September 27, 2007. Retrieved 

September 18, 2021.

9. Kushner, David. “The Real 

Story of Stuxnet”. ieee.org. IEEE

Spectrum. February 26, 2013. 

Retrieved September 18, 2021.

Integration

While the separation between

protection and condition 

monitoring in the legacy VM600 

architecture was desirable from

the standpoint of cybersecurity, it 

was not optimal in other respects.

In particular, because there was

no communication at all between

the condition monitoring and 

protection environments, it was

cumbersome to see the status of 

the protection system alarms from 

within the condition monitoring

software.

Also, the same measurements 

(such as overall amplitude or 1X 

amplitude) were generated in each

path (protection and condition 

monitoring) but could be slightly

different due to different circuitry in 

different cards. Work-arounds were

available but the environments 

for viewing protection and

condition monitoring statuses and 

information were not truly unified.