Industrial Firewall

With the last post from Eric and Joann Byres below, this blog is now closed.  However, Belden continues to publish ICS security articles at the Industrial Security blog on Belden.com. 

This blog is the last one from me as a member of the company that manufactures and sells Tofino Security products. Joann Byres (Tofino co-founder and Belden Vice President) and I are retiring from the Tofino Security group at Belden effective January 30, 2015.

The age of malware specifically targeting industrial control systems (ICS) began in 2010 when Stuxnet was revealed to be disrupting operations at one of Iran’s nuclear enrichment facilities. Since that shock, we have seen advanced malware, such as Flame and Duqu, target energy companies for espionage purposes.

When I started Tofino Security in 2006, my two goals were to make industrial cyber security easy to deploy and better suited for the real needs of mission critical networks. Our first generation products went a long way in doing that, but like any initial offerings they reflected a limited feedback loop from users in the field.

Today I am proud to say that we have integrated lessons learned over the last eight years to deliver Tofino 2.0, our next generation of industrial cyber security solutions.

Tofino 2.0 is a suite of products and services that includes:

If you are a regular follower of this blog, you’ve probably noticed that I haven’t been writing much in the past few months. I have simply been too busy, traveling and speaking at some really great security conferences.

Recently there was a thread on SCADASEC news, a restricted access critical infrastructure mailing list, about the challenges of firewalling BACnet networks. If you only work in the industrial automation space, you may not have heard of this protocol, but it is big in building automation. Regardless, the discussion around BACnet applies to many industrial protocols.

Improving the cyber security of industrial networks is a challenge you may be facing.

On the one hand your manufacturing processes probably use devices such as PLCs (programmable logic controllers) and DCS (distributed control systems) that were designed with a focus on reliability and safety rather than security. On the other hand your industrial networks are already, or soon will be, connected to your company’s enterprise networks and migrated to Ethernet.