Claroty, Airbus CyberSecurity team to improve security of manufacturing and industrial assets

industrial assets

Industrial cybersecurity company Claroty has partnered on Tuesday with Airbus CyberSecurity to strengthen the security of manufacturing environments and industrial assets in critical national infrastructure (CNI), government, and defence organisations. Airbus CyberSecurity is a business unit within Airbus Defence and Space, its defence and aerospace business.

The integrated offering will bring to its users improved cyber resilience by protecting customers’ critical systems from cyber threats and downtime while improving overall productivity with safer connections and deeper insights into their industrial assets.

The partnership will adopt Airbus CyberSecurity’s Security Operations Centre (SOC) 4.0 managed security services with Claroty’s industrial cybersecurity platform. With this managed service, industries can detect connected manufacturing assets, determine inherent risks and detect anomalies, which are then handled in the SOC, according to the companies.

“We always endeavour to develop our cyber capability to best protect our customers and working with technology partners is a key element to our success,” Phil Jones, head of services at Airbus CyberSecurity, said in a press statement. “Our goal is to continue to defend OT environments against cyberattacks and reduce breaches and downtime of critical systems.”

“The combination of Claroty technology and Airbus CyberSecurity services is what makes cybersecurity a business enabler rather than a roadblock,” said Keith Carter, Claroty’s vice president of worldwide channels & alliances. “It is therefore essential to our customers’ ability to fully protect their industrial assets, as their manufacturing environments become increasingly interconnected and newly exposed to a wide range of cyber threats.”

Industry 4.0 is driving manufacturing environments to be more interconnected than ever before, in the pursuit of production efficiency to save costs and increase output. This has led to previously isolated operational technology (OT) networks that have become directly or indirectly connected to the internet, which increases the attack surface available to adversaries. 

European legislation, such as the NIS Directive, set a range of cybersecurity requirements for operators of essential services in manufacturing, space, energy, water utilities and other sectors, apart from country- and industry-specific standards. 

Additionally, securing industrial assets is increasingly seen as a business enabler, as it allows for trusted connections and deeper analytics. The Airbus and Claroty partnership will help customers address rising security challenges and gain new insights into how security can increase manufacturing productivity even further.

In a recent survey from Trend Micro on the state of industrial cybersecurity and the challenges facing the manufacturing sector, most manufacturers have experienced cybersecurity incidents in their smart factories and are struggling to deploy the technology needed to effectively manage cyber risk. 

The survey found that 78 percent of respondents identified technology as the biggest security challenge, while 68 percent of respondents cited people and 67 percent cited process as the biggest challenge within these environments.

Another loophole cited by a Trend Micro executive was that technology is the biggest challenge faced by manufacturers. “The software and firmware of critical assets running legacy systems are no longer updated, meaning newly-discovered vulnerabilities will not be patched,” said Bharat Mistry, Trend Micro’s UK technical director. “Many control communication protocols are not encrypted, which also makes it easy for hackers to manipulate factory operations and disrupt production.”

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