February 11, 2016 - Ultra Electronics introduces CyberFence cyber-protection that monitors and cyber-hardens vulnerable OPC Classic applications to protect existing critical safety systems that use OPC DA, HDA or A&E.
OPC is one of the world’s leading protocols in process automation, valued for its utility in enabling interoperability among widely varying components and technologies. It is also the source of frequent threat warnings because its method of operation exposes control networks to attacks that traditional firewalls cannot protect against. This was publicly demonstrated when the Havex malware, deployed during the Energetic Bear/DragonFly ICS cyber-attack campaigns, targeted OPC and caused crashes and denial-of-service impacts to many infected systems.
CyberFence ensures that only authorized OPC applications can communicate by using DPI (deep packet inspection) technology to selectively permit traffic flows to dynamically assigned ports on networked workstations. CyberFence manages traffic flows for improved operational stability and efficiency by:
- Dynamically learning authorized OPC applications
- Tracking TCP port assignments by OPC servers
- Blocking OPC requests that do not comply with set standards
- Blocking unauthorized OPC requests and port-hijacking
- Providing simple configuration control for OPC clients and servers
- Standardizing methods for alerting & reporting unauthorized activity