This Is How Industrial Plants Are Made Secure With IoT Solutions

Modern security solutions can also monitor industrial systems – and thus guarantee security up to the last.

IoT solutions are being used more and more frequently in the industry. The industrial IoT (IIot) offers companies a wide range of predictive maintenance, intelligent measurement technology, system management and fleet management. However, with this expansion of the networks into the least accessible corner, companies’ attack surface also increases. To avoid massive physical damage to industrial plants and machines and the potential failure of the entire production, companies are well-advised to attach great importance to securing their IIoT environments.

Industrial Plants: IT And OT Must Work Closely Together

Traditionally, the IT and operational technology (OT) teams work side by side without significant contact points. However, to find potential weak points, the employees responsible for administration and security must work closely together. Considering the complexity of the safety of OT solutions per se and the fact that security issues in IT and OT have so far been primarily resolved independently of one another, this new collaboration between these teams is no easy task.

OT Systems Go Beyond The Scope Of Current IT Security

There are fundamental problems in securing OT environments with traditional IT security solutions: On the one hand, many solutions are based on installing a software client. In older industrial plants, this often fails because the operating system is missing or out of date or a closed, proprietary system. On the other hand, IT security solutions want to protect OT devices from the outside and only allow concrete tunnels for communication. None of the approaches was developed for the diversity of networked OT. The devices used were not intended to integrate the security monitoring and management tools designed for corporate IT networks. This problem has profound implications for organizations.

UEBA: Check The Behaviour

The behaviour of OT devices is usually relatively predictable. This behaviour is documented in logs, containing thousands of log data per second per OT device. SIEM solutions can collect this log data and make it accessible for monitoring the devices. Older SIEM solutions still lacked the necessary technology to analyze this large amount of log data effectively. The latest generation of SIEM solutions relies on highly automated behaviour analysis. This “User Entity Behavior Analytics” (UEBA) massively simplifies the monitoring of the security of IIoT devices. Using analytics to model a comprehensive average behavioural profile of all entities, a UEBA solution can identify any activity deviating from the baseline.

Security For Industrial Plants Down To The Last Corner

To secure IIoT environments in a meaningful way, OT and IT teams have to come together and find an integrated solution that guarantees the integrity of the company down to the last nook and cranny. To monitor a wide variety of OT solutions in real-time, SOC teams can use the latest generation of SIEM solutions. With behavioural analyzes, create full transparency for all users and entities in the network company-wide. In this way, threats can also be detected quickly and reliably on all IIoT devices in the network, including lateral movements that are otherwise difficult to detect and zero-day exploits.