New Eagle Tofino security profiles
May 2013
IT in Manufacturing
Belden has announced an update to the Eagle Tofino industrial security solution to include ‘Security Profiles’. Part of the version 1.7 product release, this new feature addresses the post-Stuxnet trend of a dramatic escalation in the number of public disclosures of industrial control system vulnerabilities.
Tofino Security Profiles provide a simple way for automation system vendors to create and distribute rule and protocol definitions to address newly disclosed vulnerabilities. Control system customers benefit from a single, easy to deploy package of tailored rules that can be installed without impacting operations. The result is that manufacturing facilities can defend themselves against new threats quickly and effectively.
The discovery of the Stuxnet malware in 2010 alerted the security researcher community to how easy it is to cause damage to industrial systems. Designed with a focus on reliability and safety, rather than security, devices such as PLCs (programmable logic controllers) and DCS (distributed control systems) are often easy to exploit. In the year 2011 more industrial control system vulnerabilities were made public than in the entire previous decade. Even more troubling, the publicly disclosed vulnerabilities are only a fraction of the conservatively estimated 100 000 or more that exist in the field today.
Improvements to the Eagle Tofino product line in version 1.7 include:
* Improved Event Logging – Installations with the Eagle Tofino Event Logger are able to send security event information to a central syslog server. This helps meet industry standards by continuously recording security events and provides the extra security of undiscoverable security appliances.
* New VLAN Support – Security Appliances and the Eagle Tofino CMP now support VLAN tagged network traffic, preventing hackers from using double-tag attacks to ‘jump’ between VLANs.
* Enhanced OPC Support – OPC Enforcer now supports non-standard OPC products as well as OPC over intermittent networks.
* Support for more protocols and products – More than 90 industrial and IT protocols and 60 control products are now supported.
“We have consistently heard from both vendors and customers how difficult it is to apply security updates to industrial networks with continuous production and many legacy devices,” said Eric Byres, CTO and vice president of engineering at Tofino Security. “The Eagle Tofino 1.7 product line solves a major difficulty, making it simple and safe to implement security updates into operating facilities.”
For more information contact Cliff Nel, IAC, +27 (0)12 657 3600, [email protected], www.iaconline.co.za
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