Deepika ChauhanOPSWAT, ondeso and EMT in association with the Global CIO Forum organised a virtual summit on the Protect Your Critical Infrastructure on 26th January 2022. The conference focused on critical infrastructure describes technology systems and assets that are vital to either a company or country that their incapacity would have a disastrous impact. In IT World Critical Infrastructure is always referred as Operational Technology, OT networks. OT is the practice of using hardware and software to control industrial equipment.
For the past couple of years, threat actors have consistently targeted organisations in the energy, oil and gas and utility sectors. Cyberattacks on critical infrastructure have become increasingly complex and more disruptive, causing systems to shut down and disrupt operations.
ICS environments can also serve as a gateway into enterprise and government IT networks, which frequently maintain incredibly sensitive IP, company, and customer data, as well as classified national security information. Simply put, it is because of such high stakes that critical infrastructure organizations need an abundance of qualified, highly skilled cybersecurity pros 24/7/365 to help identify, mitigate, and remediate threats of all types.
Nandini Sapru, Vice President of Sales, EMT welcomed all the speakers and attendees at the Protect Your Critical Infrastructure webinar. Speaking on the Critical Infrastructure, Nandini Sapru said, “It is what makes a company’s data or network so critical to being well managed that in case of a calamity or compromise a lot of people and a lot of data and a lot of situations would be affected such that sometimes the entire company or even an entire country may be under threat or under compromise. So, some critical infrastructure sectors are banking and finance because of course they manage the finance of individuals, companies and sometimes even country’s Food and Grocery, Energy, Space and Research, Education, Transport, Electricity, Water, Defense, Healthcare and so on.”
Critical infrastructure security is highly important in protecting systems and services that are essential to society and the economy.
Fawad Laiq, Senior Technical Manager, emt Distribution briefed the Challenges faced in OT Networks and said, “Many of the OT Networks have a lot of legacy systems. Their updates, patching and management is not that easy because of the restrictions including physical and even the logical restriction which we have in a place. Also, these connected devices may cause breaches and sometimes they are not patch for many months and even years because of the dependency on different legacy system and different legacy applications that is something difficult to manage in terms of keeping them to the latest security patches, latest tactics, latest protocols is not easy to manage.”
Oren Dvoskin, Vice-President of OT and Industry Marketing, OPSWAT talked about 2020-2021 OT/ICS Security trends and OPSWAT OT, Industrial Cybersecurity, OPSWAT Netwall, and Unidirectional file transfers and said, “Last couple of days have been quite alarming in the global market with activities by alleged state nation hacking groups beginning by the Ukraine Government having multiple sites being shut down by ransomware and arrest of hacking group activists and finally the attack on the Belarus rail as an active protest and very interesting things happening in the global landscape.”
Vincent Turmel, Senior Director of OT Product Sales Engineering, OPSWAT highlighted few essential points including Unidirectional file transfers, OT/ICS data replication, Data Center Security, Case Study electricity distribution, Case study OPC UA Replication.
Peter Lukesch, COO, ondeso also highlighted the hidden Potential of strategic IT Management in Industrial Environments; avoiding vulnerabilities, improving reliability and quality; the major errors; operational technology and information technology solutions; user friendly as well as powerful.
Arun Shankar, Editor, GEC Media Group conducted an interesting Q&A session with Oren Dvoskin, Vice President of OT and Industry Marketing, OPSWAT; Vincent Turmel, Senior Director of OT product Sales Engineering, OPSWAT; Nandini Sapru, Vice President of Sales, EMT and Peter Lukesch, COO, ondeso.
The event was concluded with an amazing quiz with the attendees and contestant Megha Arora won an iphone 13 during the event.
