Cybersecurity should no longer be seen as a one-off activity. Security must be seen as a process, not as an action. Alongside the traditional prevention and detection activities that involve strengthening the security of systems, reducing the scope for attack by securing access and signature-based detection, threat analysis and response activities must also be incorporated.
Improving security requires a proactive approach that includes threat-hunting activities, and also identifying and investigating threats and intrusions. These help to streamline the incident response process, increase the speed of response and at the same time reduce the rate of false-positive incidents.
In this context, an up-to-date approach based on a continuous and real-time process is needed. This process must be passive and non-intrusive in order not to get in the way of business processes. Finally, this process must be able to work in heterogeneous environments, in environments where there is equipment from different vendors, which is to be agnostic to different equipment regardless of its source.
Obviously, you can’t protect what you don’t know you have. You need to establish effective asset management and collate up-to-date inventory databases of OT network equipment and systems, of installed hardware and software. Together, this will inform risk management practices, among them patching, when new vulnerabilities arise.
Safetech experts use Microsoft Defender for IoT for agentless network detection and response (NDR) that is rapidly deployed, works with diverse IoT, OT, and industrial control system (ICS) devices, and interoperates with Microsoft 365 Defender, Microsoft Sentinel, and external security operations center (SOC) tools.
Discover all IoT/OT devices in the network
Use passive, agentless network monitoring to safely gain a complete inventory of all IoT/OT assets, with zero impact on IoT/OT performance. Analyze diverse and proprietary industrial protocols to visualize the IoT/OT network topology and see communication paths, and then use that information to accelerate network segmentation and zero trust initiatives. Identify equipment details such as manufacturer, device type, serial number, firmware level, and backplane layouts. Quickly identify the root cause of operational issues such as misconfigured devices and networks.
Protect devices with a risk-based approach
Proactively address vulnerabilities in all IoT/OT environments. Identify risks such as missing patches, open ports, unauthorized applications, and unauthorized subnet connections. Detect changes to device configurations, controller logic, and firmware. Prioritize fixes based on risk scoring and automated threat modeling, which identifies and visualizes the most likely attack paths for adversaries to compromise your most critical or crown jewel assets.
Detect threats with IoT/OT behavioral analytics
Monitor for anomalous or unauthorized activity using IoT/OT-aware behavioral analytics and threat intelligence. Strengthen IoT/OT zero trust security by instantly detecting unauthorized remote access and unauthorized or compromised devices. Rapidly triage real-time alerts, investigate historical traffic, and hunt for threats. Catch modern threats like zero-day malware and living-off-the-land tactics missed by static indicators of compromise (IOCs). Explore full-fidelity packet captures (PCAPs) for deeper analysis.