The Cybersecurity Landscape Today

In today's digital age, how you ensure the cybersecurity of your critical infrastructure is perhaps one of the most important parts of your operation. Whether you're running a water treatment plant, a power plant, or a manufacturing facility, you face an ever-growing array of possible cybersecurity risks. You have to deal not just with external threats, but internal threats as well - what if there's an insider attack? What if there's a bad configuration deployed? What if someone just made an honest mistake? Each of these represents an opportunity for significant, potentially permanent damage to be done. More than ever, it's important to adopt technologies that will be able to defend your facility in the face of advanced, never-before-seen attack vectors.

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The problem with always-online systems

One of the biggest challenges in securing critical infrastructure today lies in the use of always-online systems for monitoring digital assets. For example, digital assets such as programmable logic controllers (PLCs) are vital components in industrial control systems, responsible for automating processes and making sure that your machinery runs smoothly. PLCs represent a wealth of information not just on how your process is performing, but also on whether the process is actively degrading or being disrupted, potentially from an attacker seeking to damage or affect your equipment. Traditional, existing data-driven PLC monitoring approaches require that you centralize this data collection - move it all to the control room (or the cloud), build up a process data model, and use that model to detect anomalies. But what do you do if the monitoring solution itself is always online? What do you do if you lose connection to their system? How can you guarantee that a bad update won't brick their monitoring, or worse, leave you exposed to attackers or even unable to operate your own machinery?

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OTAware: Offline-by-default Monitoring of Your Most Critical Assets

To meet the need for monitoring that doesn't fundamentally compromise your systems, Sentinel Devices has developed OTAware - an offline-by-default approach to PLC data monitoring and anomaly detection that is totally air-gapped and self-contained, and is designed to operate so indefinitely. Our approach significantly enhances the cybersecurity of facilities by making sure that your equipment gets all the benefits of 24/7/365 monitoring without exposing you to the risks associated with an always-online internet connection. By taking this approach, we're improving your cybersecurity in three core areas:

1. Zero risks from external patches
   • Let's face it: patching makes you tense. If your equipment is behaving normally, and all seems well, the last thing you may want to do is disrupt a perfectly working operational system. This goes double for patches that might be applied without your awareness or explicit consent - in an always-online environment, software updates that break your infrastructure in a moment's notice are a real and persistent risk. By being offline-by-default, OTAware gives you the benefits of equipment monitoring without the risks of suddenly having your equipment behavior change under your feet. Upgrading can still be done on your time - but now you're fully in control.
2. Zero risks from disrupted connectivity
   
   • One of the primary advantages of our offline-by-default approach is the reduction in internet dependence. If a solution is always-online, that brings inherent questions around risk - what happens if the third-party server goes down? What happens if your connection to that server goes down? What happens if someone forgets to pay the bill? By doing everything offline, in scenarios where internet connectivity is disrupted, either due to cyber incidents or other issues, your monitoring will continue to function effectively. This ensures uninterrupted operations and maintains the integrity of your processes, start to finish.
3. Zero risks from the outside world
   • Being independent from the internet also means you don't need to worry about attackers getting in through an external connection. In an always-connected environment, there will always be the risk that an attacker can try and get in via various data links - expired keys, phished credentials and more are all valid avenues an attacker might use to get in. What's more, third-party vulnerabilities - the kind you have no way to identify - might be able to be present and exploited at any time. You could do everything right, and still leave yourself vulnerable. If you remove all possibility of connections to the outside world, however, things become a lot simpler - an attacker has to physically come on-site in order to attack or otherwise access your network, making it that much harder for them and making you that much more secure.

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Why Choose OTAware?

Sentinel Devices' commitment to cybersecurity is grounded in our understanding of the evolving threat landscape and our dedication to protecting critical infrastructure. Our goal is not to make our attack database smarter - our goal is to make each and every single piece of equipment in your facility intelligent enough to identify attacks on their own. Here's where OTAware stands out:

1. We make compliance a breeze
   • Because OTAware is offline-by-default, deploying OTAware won't require you to clear an external connection, a third-party server, or any other components with your cybersecurity team. This means you can shorten the deployment time of cyber-physical monitoring from years - in the most extreme cases - to weeks, or even days.
2. We are tailored for critical infrastructure
   • OTAware is specifically designed for critical infrastructure facilities. From the hardware we use to the software we deploy, we understand the unique challenges and requirements of these environments and have tailored OTAware to function - and function well - within them. And we're not focused on monitoring an abstract part of your facility - each PLC OTAware monitors will be explicitly important, meaning OTAware will actively be watching over the lifeblood of your facility.
3. We are truly scalable
   • Depending on the level of commitment, deploying a cyber-physical monitoring solution across your entire enterprise can be a years-long effort even after cyber-review. A large component of this comes from the complexity and cost of centralization - how many servers need to be provisioned, where are they going to be, and more are all questions that are going to determine how many machines any solution can realistically scale to. With OTAware, you can scale as much as you want - you can deploy OTAware only on 5 machines, or on 5,000 machines, your total-cost-of-ownership and complexity per-machine stay exactly the same in either case.
4. We are always watching
   • OTAware uses state-of-the-art asset statistical machine learning algorithms that have been engineered and purpose-built for asset monitoring. This means our algorithms never hallucinate - each copy of OTAware efficiently and effectively trains itself on only the data that has been explicitly shown to it, and for each decision made, can explicitly point out which portions of its training data caused it to give a specific answer. As long as your equipment has power, OTAware will be watching and monitoring - ensuring your equipment is behaving normally, and letting you know the instant it isn't.

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A Safer Future with Zero-Cloud Monitoring

As cyber threats continue to evolve, the need for advanced cybersecurity measures becomes increasingly critical. OTAware's offline-by-default approach to PLC data monitoring is a radical new approach that enhances the security of critical infrastructure facilities without requiring compromise with an active internet connection. By limiting exposure, proactively detecting threats, and reducing internet dependence, we provide a comprehensive defense against the ever-growing landscape of cyber threats.

Choosing our solution means investing in a safer, more secure future for your facility. Protect your operations, safeguard your data, and ensure the continuity of essential services with OTAware today.