Why OT and manufacturing environments need better detection capabilities
The volume and streaming of attacks are incessant as we are all inundated with information on the latest attack or exploit, and it is up to you and your security partners to find ways to try and keep up and ensure protections are in place. Unfortunately, as seen by attack trends, we are often required to refocus our attention and address a critical security gap that has otherwise gone unnoticed or wasn’t a prior concern. Case in point: there has been a significant increase in direct or indirect attacks, with more than half of industrial firms (54%) suffering a ransomware attack.
Attackers have realized they can do a great deal of damage or disruption and get paid when they can access OT environments where they target Industrial Control Systems (ICS) or Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) systems. The methods of gaining access to these systems haven’t received as much attention as other attacks until recently – even though the number of incidents have been increasing significantly. Suffice to say, attackers typically gain unauthorized access to the network OT systems reside on or are connected to by leveraging vulnerabilities and exploiting them due to outdated software, use of default/weak passwords, or poorly configured networks.
The goal for OT security is to be able to secure the systems involved in the production or processing of goods, such as manufacturing (gas, cars, pharma, mining), water treatment plants, transportation, food production, energy, etc. But as the adage goes, you can only protect and detect malicious activity on things you have visibility to. You are probably thinking, “Got it, OT environments are under attack, so what can I do?”.
To assess if you are at risk or are currently under attack within the systems connected to your OT environment – or if the OT systems themselves are vulnerable or being exploited – you need to be able to easily and quickly analyze the files running on your appliances or systems. By getting to the ground source of truth – your executable or executable-like files – you are able to determine if threats or variants are putting your operations at risk. Unfortunately, most security tools out there don’t support the ability to easily ingest and analyze the files on connected appliances or the operating systems currently used for your manufacturing environments.
Stairwell is here to help you get visibility into your operations as Stairwell is already deployed within manufacturing environments, detecting threats and vulnerabilities on traditional systems as well as systems not supported by everyday detection tools. Industrial and infrastructure customers can get an immediate view of their manufacturing environment and determine if they are “in the clear” before going into production, as Stairwell provides continuous dynamic and static file analysis at the binary level for their testing and production environments.
To learn how you can protect your processing and operation environments by detecting even the most advanced threats, let Stairwell show you how we are changing up the security game and detecting the threats missed by others.
