PROTECTING INDUSTRIAL CONTROL SYSTEMS AND SCADA NETWORKS

January 18, 2019

Starting with the Industrial Revolution in 18th-Century Manchester, the manufacturing industry has typically undergone a revolution every hundred years. In an age of ever increasing technological advancement, though, times are changing at a faster pace, as we see the era of controller-based automation gradually replaced by the ‘Smart Factory’, otherwise known as Industry 4.0 or Smart Grid in the Energy market. While this progress aims to streamline manufacturing processes, these changes also bring new cyber risks and threats to Industrial Control Systems (ICS) that are vulnerable from exploits that are now freely available on the Internet. The vulnerabilities vary from basic issues like systems without passwords or with hard-coded passwords to configuration issues, software bugs and hardware vulnerabilities. Once an attacker is able to run software on a host that has access to a controller, the likelihood of a successful attack is very high.

Spotlight

Strongarm by Percipient Networks

Percipient Networks’ cloud-based intelligent malware solution Strongarm is designed specifically for underserved small and medium-sized businesses. Through its agentless inside-out approach to security, Strongarm automatically and immediately detects, stops and remediates malware with the sophistication of an enterprise product but without the high cost and complexity.

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