New York – September 13, 2026 -- Cyware is backing a Department of Energy-funded initiative led by the research arm of the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association (NRECA) to expand Operational Technology (OT) monitoring across nearly 900 electric cooperatives nationwide.
NRECA targets standardized threat data across rural utility networks
The project, run under NRECA's ICS-REC program, aims to standardize the collection, correlation and normalization of OT security data from participating rural cooperatives, enabling centralized analysis and faster threat detection across the grid.
"A key goal at NRECA is to help rural electric cooperatives strengthen their cybersecurity standing through greater visibility, collaboration and shared intelligence," said Adrian McNamara, Principal Cybersecurity Program Manager and ICS-REC project lead at NRECA. He said the framework will deliver more actionable insights back to the cooperative community, improving coordination and resilience.
Cyware to support automated alert sharing between SOC teams
Cyware, which specializes in agentic AI-powered threat intelligence and collective defense, will support automated, community-wide access to high-value OT alerts between security operations center (SOC) teams of participating cooperatives. Tom Stockmeyer, Cyware's Managing Director for Government and Critical Infrastructure, said OT information sharing remains challenging industry-wide despite existing efforts, and the company aims to help close that gap.
Early results show gains in visibility and logging among participating utilities
Utilities already participating in the initiative have reported measurable improvements in visibility, logging capabilities and alerting. The project's next phase will focus on closing the market gap for smaller, less-resourced utilities and enabling automatic sharing of validated findings with the broader cooperative community.
NRECA stated it does not endorse any commercial product or service in connection with the initiative.