As industrial systems become increasingly connected to IT, Cloud and ERP systems, they become increasingly exposed to cyber threats such as ransomware. In fact, cyber threats for industrial control systems (ICS) are on the rise.
Asset owners are often operating legacy equipment, which contains a large number of vulnerabilities, including unpatched industrial devices, unsupported operating systems like Windows XP and Windows 7, and others. Although this equipment may be productive for now, it is not secure, and the level of risk rises with time.
SCADAfence runs into these problems constantly with their customers as their industrial cybersecurity products were designed to help their users get through these security obstacles, such as aging equipment, the adoption of IIoT devices in Industry 4.0, and visibility gaps. As SCADAfence helps their customers drive their security and regain control over their network, here are some of the problems that they see in their industrial environments.
The Challenges SCADAfence Sees In Industrial Networks Today
Asset management is often managed with cumbersome Excel sheets, which is often inaccurate, and outdated. Security teams and OT operators need to know about real-time deviations in network traffic to account for cyberattacks like Malware or Ransomware, which can spread in minutes.
When having SCADAfence installed passively in their network, their customers often discover tens to hundreds of “shadow” OT devices or devices that the operators didn't know existed. Even worse, many of the unaccounted for devices may be connected to the internet.
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Four Ways to Solve These Constant Industrial Network Challenges
1. Maximum Rate Bandwidth for Increased Data Analysis
The SCADAfence Platform was built to handle large amounts of traffic. Utilizing Garland Technology’s visibility solutions, they read every bit, byte, and packet using full deep packet inspection (DPI) to have the highest detection rate in the industry. Most industrial network monitoring platforms don’t have the bandwidth to process this sizable data.
2. Setting an Operational Baseline with Advanced AI Capabilities
SCADAfence also offers a unique Micro Granular Baseline technology. This technology learns every device’s granular traffic characteristics. Providing the most accurate detection mechanism, this unique technology helps their customers to dramatically reduce false-positives without the need to reconfigure the baseline, even with operational changes. Customers gain precise and reliable results in hours vs weeks, with continuous intelligence utilizing advanced AI capabilities.
3. Instant Analytics and Reporting for Governance and Compliance
The SCADAfence Governance Portal, provides fully automated compliance dashboards and detailed compliance reports, which allows their customers to view status trends and comparisons over time. These accurate and up-to-date compliance status are based on real network traffic data analytics that tracks and measure industrial regulations and organizational best practices.
This is especially important to critical infrastructures, which have to meet certain frameworks and compliances to work under the correct guidelines. This tool ensures that their customers can remain fully compliant with industrial standards such as NERC-CIP, IEC-62443, NIST, ISO-27001, NIS NCSC, NIST CSF, and others - including internal policies that can be set up by their own organizations.
Taking in the packet traffic from Garland’s network TAPs, SCADAfence’s stand-alone monitoring will passively scan the traffic from every appliance with the utmost industry standards. Users can choose the industry standard that they want to be compliant with and the Governance Portal will show updated real-time reports in clear detail. SCADAfence finds that their customers find this incredibly valuable and time-efficient.
4. 100% Packet-level Network Visibility with Garland Technology
It’s very important with a network monitoring solution to not be intrusive in your OT process. SCADAfence offers continuous passive OT network monitoring that provides visibility, automatic asset discovery, inventory management, risk management, and threat detection is needed to capture the current operational behavior of the environment.
Generating 100% packet-level visibility with Garland’s visibility solution, SCADAfence is able to render critical insights to detect and provide alerts on cybersecurity and operational incidents like suspicious activities, exposures, malware attacks, and operational alerts such as service availability, and misconfigurations. This allows users to gain unique visibility into remote access connections and correlate OT actions to IT accounts.
For more information visit the Garland Technology and SCADAfence joint solution. Looking to add visibility to your industrial environment, but not sure where to start? Join us for a brief network Design-IT consultation or demo. No obligation - it’s what we love to do.
