{"id":9101,"date":"2016-04-28T14:44:36","date_gmt":"2016-04-28T06:44:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.phoenixcontact.com\/marketing-sea\/?p=9101"},"modified":"2019-10-07T20:14:58","modified_gmt":"2019-10-07T12:14:58","slug":"cybersecurity-for-industrial-processes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.phoenixcontact.com\/marketing-sea\/2016\/04\/cybersecurity-for-industrial-processes\/","title":{"rendered":"Cybersecurity for Industrial Processes"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Cybersecurity for Industrial Processes<\/u><\/strong><\/p>\n

Cybersecurity has become an increasingly prevalent subject in the last decades. While the focus has been largely on IT infrastructure and online safety, more attention has now been placed on Cybersecurity for industrial processes such as factory automation, water\/wastewater plants, power generation and power T&D. This can be attributed to the increased awareness that cybersecurity required for IT is very different from cybersecurity efforts needed for industrial processes.<\/p>\n

The main difference is the priority for these two information infrastructure. In IT, it is possible to focus heavily on cybersecurity, such that emails, applications, documents can be blocked with minimal impact on a companies\u2019 P&L. On the other hand, downtime can result if files are stopped from being passed from one device to the other for Industrial processes. Downtime for Industrial processes is very costly as one can observe below.<\/p>\n

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\nThe are explicit costs due to downtime. In the case of concerted attack on Nuclear Power Plans (stuxnet incident)\u00a0 or Power T&D systems (recent Ukraine cyberattack, causing mass blackout affecting at least 200,000 citizens), prolong system downtime can lead to life being lost, severe inconveniences amongst other non-monetary, immeasurable outcomes.<\/p>\n

With such different requirements, it is then common sense that plant owners should look beyond IT cybersecurity devices for protection of industrial processes. While firewalls, VPNs, VLans, subnet etc. works for both IT and Industrial processes; IDS\/IPS (Intrusion detection system\/Intrusion protection system) is not ideal for Industrial processes because they are actively monitoring the data passing through. This not only slows down data transfer and cause delays (again, not damaging in IT network) but often results in false alarms: There can be unusual data passing through which might not be malicious but are essential to operations. IPS\/IDS will stop these data and can potentially lead to down time.<\/p>\n

In particular, IPS\/IDS are used to protect against zero-day attacks\/advanced persistent threats where an external party remains in contact with malicious code after they infiltrate systems. These external parties then manipulate these codes further to target specific loopholes. As such, anti-virus cannot detect these codes (no known signature) and firewalls\/VPNs are bypassed.<\/p>\n

At Phoenix Contact, we recommend MGuard with CIFS Integrity Monitoring that is tailored for Industrial Processes Protection against Zero-day attacks and advanced persistent threats:<\/p>\n