It is an exciting time for organizations moving toward Industry 4.0. Over recent decades, industrial control systems (ICS) have enabled the modernization of industrial automation. Today, industrial IoT (IIoT) technologies present new opportunities to increase operational efficiency and launch a new generation of products and services.
First, though, organizations have to address security. Cisco Cyber Vision is a solution designed to address these security challenges, so that organizations can control cybersecurity risk and capture the benefits of Industry 4.0.
Protecting industrial operations is a very specific challenge that cannot be addressed with traditional IT security tools. Industrial processes cannot be stopped to install a patch, and an outage can have a devastating impact on human lives or the environment. Attacks can also be difficult to detect because they are often custom-built and look like legitimate process instructions.
Security built into your industrial network
Complexity is the enemy of security. OT cybersecurity can become very complex very quickly, especially if the industrial network is spread across a country or many remote sites. For an OT cybersecurity project to succeed, it has to scale easily and at a reasonable cost.
Cisco Cyber Vision uses a unique edge computing architecture that allows security monitoring components to run inside Cisco's own industrial network equipment (IoT switches, routers, access points, industrial compute). That means there is no need to install and manage dedicated appliances, configure SPAN ports, or build an out-of-band network: the industrial network itself collects the information needed to provide full visibility, analysis, and threat detection.
Visibility
You cannot protect an asset if you do not know it is there. Cyber Vision brings visibility to the OT environment by building a list of every industrial asset at component level, automatically discovering vendor references, firmware and hardware versions, serial numbers, PLC rack slot configuration, and more.
It identifies asset relationships, communication patterns, and variable changes, presenting them in maps, tables, and reports that maintain a complete inventory. This level of visibility is key to driving network segmentation — one of the key recommendations in ISA/IEC 62443 — and it shares asset profiles with Cisco ISE to dynamically enforce segmentation policies through TrustSec.
Operational insight
Cyber Vision "understands" the proprietary OT protocols used by automation equipment, so it can track process anomalies, errors, misconfigurations, and unauthorized industrial events. It records all of these events and becomes the "flight recorder" of the industrial infrastructure, useful for analyzing attacks, finding their source, and documenting incident reports under requirements such as NERC CIP or the EU NIS directive.
Threat detection and remediation
The industrial control network is exposed both to traditional IT threats and to custom OT attacks. Cyber Vision combines protocol analysis, threat intelligence from Cisco research teams, intrusion detection, and behavior analysis to detect known and emerging attack tactics.
It is fully integrated with the Cisco security portfolio, giving security operations centers detailed information on OT assets and industrial threats, making it possible to build a unified IT/OT threat management strategy and to guarantee the continuity, resilience, and safety of operations.
Author: Fabien Maisl.