Page 2 : KICS Threat Detection & Prevention, Meeting Strict Industry Requirements
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KICS Threat Detection & Prevention
Traditionally, ICS organizations are not well prepared or protected to withstand cyber security attacks. The design of ICS software and hardware is hard to call secure. To minimize the possibility of a cyber-attack, Industrial Control Systems (ICS) is supposed to be run in a physically isolated environment. However this is not always the case.
Historically, ICS operating team is not able to recognize social engineering attacks, recognize unsafe actions and become a solid stage of cyber security in their organizations. Of cause, their main task is to provide safe and reliable production process. On the other hand, the ICS organizations cannot afford significant investment into security workforce, since this is not a priority for them. The cyber security response plan may assume that some external organization is involved for incident coordination, analysis and response actions.
Kaspersky Industrial CyberSecurity offers a combination of conventional security technologies, adapted for an ICS environment, such as anti-malware protection, whitelisting and vulnerability assessment functionality. This strong foundation is further enhanced with unique technologies designed specifically for industrial environments, including integrity check for programmable logic controller (PLC), semantic monitoring of process control commands and telemetry data to detect cyber-attacks targeting the physical part of an infrastructure.
Kaspersky Industrial CyberSecurity also provides a special observability mode that focuses solely on the detection of cyber-attacks, operation personnel faults and anomalies inside an industrial network. All prevention and detection technologies are managed via a single centralized management console.
Meeting Strict Industry Requirements
The highly customizable settings of Kaspersky Industrial CyberSecurity mean it can be configured in strict accordance with the requirements of different industries, facilities and production lines, allowing the solution to be effectively integrated into an organization’s existing ICS network and technological processes without any significant modifications to the network or to the process. All of their technologies are tested by and certified with leading ICS vendors.
When Kaspersky Lab was developing KICS, there were some unique requirements they had to meet:
[adrotate banner=”4″]- Observability mode. Security solutions are deployed extremely carefully in critical industrial environments. Solutions should be able to monitor activity and detect threats, but leave the decision to block an attack up to the operator. Industrial systems rely on customized software, so even the potential conflict between a security solution and, let’s say, operations of a railway system cannot be allowed.
- Security assessment. Critical infrastructure always works together with traditional IT, and the fact that different teams are usually responsible for security of those two entities is challenging. An independent look by security experts proficient in both industrial systems and general IT helps to identify potential weaknesses usually found at the meeting point between two systems. This is also true for any traditional IT infrastructure. In fact, the variety of endpoints, mobile devices, on-site servers and cloud services is no less complicated than a power plant.
- Exploit prevention. Technologies designed to identify attacks using previously unknown vulnerabilities is one level above traditional anti-malware systems. As we learned from Stuxnet, critical infrastructure may be targeted with the most advanced cyber weapons. Unlike traditional malware, targeted and advanced attacks require special tools.
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