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Cyber attacks, whether deliberate or not, do tend to cripple companies' infrastructure more often recently and cause a lot of damage. The creation of separate zones in the industrial network architecture can limit the damage, but cybersecurity experts also suggest more proactive measures to protect industrial networks, especially through an industrial Intrusion Prevention System (IPS), which can effectively thwart intrusions and reduce their impact.
To pursue operational efficiency and availability, it is always important to consider cyber security. One can better secure industrial networks by having a secure foundation-friendly network infrastructure, allowing authorised traffic to flow to the right places, or by identifying critical assets and providing them with layered, proactive protection, such as an industrial IPS and whitelisting control.
Moxa introduces Industrial Cybersecurity Solution. Moxa's industrial IPS protects critical assets from cyber attacks.
An IPS detects and blocks identified threats by continuously monitoring networks, looking for potential malicious cyber incidents and logging information about them. It features Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) technology, improves network security visibility, ultimately helps mitigate risks and protect industrial networks from security threats. The IPS can be placed in front of critical assets, such as PLCs and HMIs, to improve network security and ensure network availability, while protecting those assets from manipulation by malicious actors. The goal is twofold: to block malicious traffic and mitigate the problem if it does occur.
“Although IPS technology has worked very well on IT networks for a while, it is difficult to deploy an IPS directly in OT networks. After all, the first priority of OT networks is availability and performance, while in IT cyber security, confidentiality comes first. If one does not take into account the daily processing requirements of OT engineers when deploying an IPS in OT networks, important control commands for production can be blocked and disrupt business operations,” states Technolec's Karel Mus. “To meet OT cybersecurity requirements, it is essential to use OT-centric DPI technology. This is because it can identify multiple industry protocols and allow or block specific functions such as read or write access. Based on the identified protocol, an industrial IPS can then prevent unauthorised protocols or functions, making traffic on industrial networks trusted and non-harmful.”
An industrial IPS detects and blocks identified threats.
Another possibility is ‘whitelisting control’, where access is granted only to authorised devices, service, protocol format and control commands from an authorised list, called the whitelist. In this way, all network activities on industrial networks are authorised and network operators can define detailed access controls at different levels, depending on operational requirements. “OT engineers can define a white list of devices and services or IP ports that can access all or part of the network. They can also define the authorised protocol format to prevent unauthorised commands from passing through the networks and even define which control commands can pass through the network to reduce human error associated with sending a wrong control command,” explains the Technolec business manager. “Thanks to such white-list control, the likelihood of a DoS attack by OT trojans is significantly reduced.”
In response to increasing cyber threats, Moxa, which has long been developing secure network devices such as routers and Ethernet switches, is introducing its Industrial Cybersecurity Solution. Mus from official distributor Technolec concludes, “By effectively integrating OT and IT technologies, Moxa's Industrial IPS protects your critical assets from the latest cyber security threats and helps accelerate the industrial world's transition to secure automation architectures.”
