Xage Security announced yesterday its new Xage for Energy, calling it the first industrial solution to incorporate Xage’s new patented, tamperproof fingerprinting technology. The service applies distributed and scalable security to existing legacy systems, letting energy firms solve operational and security challenges arising from increasing levels of connectivity and cyberattacks, Xage said.
Energy firms are reliant on security systems that are not equipped to handle the scale and complexity of the industrial IOT. Legacy systems are unable to protect themselves against increasing cyberattacks, currently growing by 250%/year, and even existing attempts to provide some security through network configuration require ever more time and resources to manage.
To achieve secure and efficient operations, energy firms must apply scalable application-layer solutions that protect against single points of security failure, the firm said.
“To adopt IOT connectivity without gross security risk, distributed tamper proofing is needed,” said Xage CEO Duncan Greatwood in prepared remarks. “Otherwise the benefits of IOT will be wiped out by the costs of cybersecurity outages.
“The cost of each cyberattack in crew time, equipment updates, restart expenses, and production delays is many times the price of effective cyber defense – and the risk of a larger attack wiping out production across thousands of wells, solar facilities, or wind farms makes connected, tamperproof systems a necessity,” he added.
The Xage security fabric already enables remote authentication and secure device access, letting operators add, remove, and control resources securely. Xage for Energy uses fingerprint technology to extend tamper-proofing to the thousands of controllers and devices making up distributed energy operations, the firm said.
If an unauthorized change is made, the Xage fabric will flag and isolate the affected device, securing the network against malware attacks that are otherwise undetectable, it added.
