Siemens Teams Up with Tenable

Industrial control systems (ICS) and supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) giant Siemens this week added another tool to its newly revamped managed security services for the industrial sector.

Siemens, which in September announced it had added anomaly detection technology from PAS to its existing network monitoring and security services, now will incorporate Tenable Network Security's vulnerability detection and management technology into a new managed security service offering for critical infrastructure providers.

Managed security services has become an attractive new role for Siemens and other major ICS/SCADA equipment vendors, whose industrial customers are increasingly in the bullseye of malware infections and nation-state hackers looking for leverage against other nations. Industrial networks notoriously are short on cybersecurity expertise and technology as they continue to play catch-up in locking down their networks from attackers. So for Siemens and its competitors, offering managed security services is a logical next step in their strategies.

Siemens' process control systems were infamously abused by the Stuxnet worm that ultimately sabotaged centrifuges in Iran's Natanz nuclear facility and served as a major wakeup call for utilities worldwide after it hit seven years ago. In the wake of the attacks, Siemens was among the first ICS/SCADA vendor to build a secure software development program and roll out new products with built-in security features.

Leo Simonovich, Siemens' vice president and global head of industrial cyber and digital security, says Tenable's vulnerability management brings to the service the ability to find and prioritize vulnerabilities and fixes in an industrial network. "Our [industrial] customers today are overwhelmed with the number of notifications they get, and on the IT side, they don't necessarily have the abilities and manpower to address them," he says.

Tenable's Nessus-based technology differs from PAS's anomaly detection technology, which monitors all brands of industrial and computing equipment on a plant network. "Tenable provides the same problem set from a network point of view. It's important to have both" points of view of the environment, he says.

"We're focusing on identifying assets [in the network], so there's a little overlap there with" PAS's technology in Siemens' managed security offering, says Ray Komar, vice president of technical alliances at Tenable. "We add a vulnerability perspective, so less on configuration like [PAS]."

Siemens earlier this year added network monitoring to its services via a partnership with Darktrace. Siemens' new offering with Tenable will be available in early 2018, with oil and gas and other utilities as the main focus, Simonovich says.

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