Willy Leichter, Virsec, leads 3-minute talk with Rashesh Mody and Satya Gupta about tackling security challenges facing the ICS industry.
Willy: We’re here at the Aveva World Conference in Dallas, Texas and we’re speaking with Rashesh Mody (Aveva) and Satya Gupta. We want to briefly talk about some of the security challenges that seem to be facing the ICS security industry and how Aveva and Virsec are approaching them.
Rashesh: Sure. Security provides a very important role for us. We provide software to very big mission-critical applications, whether it’s pipeline management, whether it’s in water, wastewater, food and beverage, power, mining, so many different verticals require secure operations. And many customers are asking that their installations and projects are safe and reliable. So we wanted to find the best partner in this market and align with somebody with lots of security knowledge and see how we can make our platform better and help customers. And Virsec is a very close partner of ours and we started utilizing their technology to make sure all of the software and technology we implement are highly secure.
Willy: Satya, could you speak very high level about how we support Aveva?
Satya: Yes, we’ve been working with Aveva the last 17-18 months. We’ve been subjected to a large set of tests and what we do is we instrument every process that is available in a SCADA system and make sure it is safe from targeted in-memory attacks. Not only that, as soon as a process appears that it is drifting off, we pull it back in using a pre-emptive protective engine.
Willy: Rashesh, Aveva’s focus on security, does this differentiate you in the industry?
Rashesh: Oh absolutely. Security is very important for all of these industries and we want to differentiate ourselves. Because as a market leader you ‘ve got to keep the leadership ahead. And the way we look at it, it’s a 2-prong strategy. It’s not only securing our software internally, for all the new life cycle, design, everything should be security focused. Second, we wanted to make sure all the security consortium, association, we play a leading role. And thirdly, from the biggest ecosystem perspective, how do we bring the security players into the family. We do endpoint protection and we want to make sure about in process protection. And Virsec plays a roll there. So it’s very good to have a great partnership and moving forward with great momentum.
Willy: Great. And last question, Satya. Could you elaborate on this in-memory protection, what that means, why it’s a new frontier?
Satya: Yes. So the most sophisticated attackers are nation states and organized criminal gangs that are looking to disrupt control systems are using very sophisticated techniques that burrow into process memory. And if you do not have a solution like Virsec Security Platform, then it is almost impossible to spot those attacks in time. So this is why we are very happy to work with Aveva and protect the really important processes that you have, and protecting our nation’s very important processes.
All: Thank you. Great partnership, great collaboration!