DOE CESER awards Frenos $1.1 million to enhance the security of U.S. energy infrastructure

Frenos was named one of three vendors awarded funding through the Department of Energy's (DOE) Office of Cybersecurity, Energy Security, and Emergency Response (CESER) Securing ENergy Technology ResiliencY (SENTRY) project.

SENTRY funds work across four areas: energy sector risk quantification, ICS/OT cybersecurity and threat emulation, security for decentralized asset management systems, and counter-drone capabilities for utilities.

Frenos's $1,099,833 award falls under SENTRY's ICS/OT cybersecurity and threat emulation focus area. The award supports Frenos's work building an integrated adversary emulation platform for energy delivery systems. The platform combines the Frenos adversarial AI platform with a new OT threat-intelligence layer and the MITRE Caldera execution framework, aiming to surface real attack chains in utility OT environments and return prioritized remediation and detection guidance.

"Our team spent years as OT cybersecurity practitioners and operators before founding Frenos, and this award lets us scale that experience into technology the field actually needs," said Brian Proctor, CEO of Frenos. "We're running live, real-world testing so the results are something the OT security community can see and validate for themselves."

Frenos has completed kickoff with DOE and ConnectWerx, and work is now underway on the first phase: defining the platform architecture and API foundation. Later phases include building out test environments, producing training materials and documentation for stakeholders, and a 90-day real-world deployment at a mid-sized utility. The project runs from July 2026 to December 2027, with results and findings to be published at its conclusion.

The funding comes amid a sharp rise in nation-state groups targeting U.S. energy infrastructure. In April 2026, CISA and federal partners warned that Iran-affiliated hackers had disrupted U.S. infrastructure by targeting programmable logic controllers, with the advisory specifically covering the energy sector.

The SENTRY award builds on Frenos's core approach. Frenos pairs digital twin technology with SAIRA, its AI reasoning agent, to simulate adversary attacks against industrial control systems and critical infrastructure before real attackers do. The threat emulation work funded by SENTRY extends that same model to substations and distributed energy resources specifically.

Stay tuned for updates as this work progresses.