With increased awareness of cyber security attacks on industry, companies are starting to understand the devastating production and financial losses these attacks are capable of. Industrial networks are often full of legacy hardware that was never envisaged to be connected to the internet. This has led to the rise in targeted attacks on these networks and the need to implement security mechanisms to avoid exploitation and compromise.
The IEC-62443 standard was developed to assist with providing an international framework to work towards securing vulnerabilities in Industrial Automation and Control Systems (IACS) networks. Guidelines for basic, medium and high security levels within the standard denote increasing levels of security policy adoption.
A basic level includes items such as default password changes, account timeouts and enabling trusted access to the device. A high level of adoption may include device configuration file encryption.
Adoption of any level of IEC-62443 is optional and dependent upon a risk assessment of the network. While not a guarantee of threat immunity, it does serve as an excellent and agreed upon starting point.
Implementing the highest level of security
To assist with adoption of the highest level of IEC-62443 conformity, Moxa has developed an “E” series managed switch range. These easy-to-install and configure switches allow the user to implement the highest level of the IEC-62443 standard – with security built into the component.
Not limiting itself to just switches, Moxa has also developed a range of compliant devices, including serial to Ethernet servers, protocol gateways, firewalls and wireless access hardware that are also IEC-62443 aware.
Obtaining an understanding of how secure your network is may seem like a difficult and long winded process, however Moxa’s MxView is the component supplier’s answer to a Network Management System (NMS).
While it will effortlessly discover all Moxa and non-Moxa hardware on your network, automatically draw a topology map and provide an excellent overview of your network, it can also do a lot more.
The latest version will provide you with a colour-coded visual of how secure your network connected devices are.
Four colour codes relate directly to the IEC-62443 standard (open, basic, medium, high). MxView allows you to centrally view security events as well as provide the ability to mass configure settings from a central location.
Being able to deploy changes and updates of settings relating to the IEC standard ensures a uniform deployment across the network. The MxView software suite is licensed based on the number of network connected devices being monitored.
This makes it an extremely cost-effective network monitoring tool, with the added benefit of the security awareness monitoring, link bandwidth monitoring, and centralised administration of your network.
This partner content is brought to you by Madison Technologies. For more tips on strengthening industrial network security, and to learn more about Moxa’s range of IEC-62443 compliant devices from Madison Technologies, visit www.madison.tech/moxa-CyberSecureReady or phone 1800 72 79 79.
