AVEVA partners with Virsec to strengthen defense against cyberattacks

The partnership provides in-memory protection for ICS and SCADA software systems

By Wayne Labs, Senior Contributing Technical Editor

AVEVA , a supplier of engineering and industrial software, has signed a partnership agreement with cybersecurity software firm Virsec.

Through the partnership, AVEVA users (e.g., those running Wonderware, Citect or other applications) gain access to in-memory cyber protection for industrial control (ICS) and supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) systems. Virsec’s technology looks at real-time data flows in memory and intercepts code that may be a cyber attack. Virsec also works with web servers to prevent malicious code from attacking a site.

As IT and OT systems converge, an increase in high-profile attacks targeting critical infrastructure has raised security concerns. Virsec Trusted Execution provides an effective layer of protection against these attacks by ensuring that applications perform only as designed.

Trusted Execution is a deterministic way of identifying malicious exploits and attacks based on CPU and memory level visibility of an application’s execution path. Virsec believes this approach is as fundamental as signatures, behavioral, predictive and other forms of security detection have been, however, more precise, given the method’s deep context and high-performance protection.

As many sophisticated hackers today exploit memory, monitoring memory read/writes and activity in real time is an absolute necessity. The Trusted Execution system can see illegal remote shell sessions emanating from buffer overrun and returntolibc attacks as well as other memory corruption attacks.

“We are thrilled to help AVEVA proactively protect industrial, engineering and critical infrastructure organizations from these dangerous security threats,” says Atiq Raza, CEO of Virsec. “With this partnership, we can now provide AVEVA customers our industry-leading technology as an integrated part of an AVEVA solution.”

On January 30, 2018 AVEVA announced a partnership with Cylance to provide end-point protection to AVEVA’s software portfolio. This protection—combined with Virsec’s in-memory protection—strengthens the overall security of AVEVA’s industrial software portfolio.

KEYWORDS: cybersecurity software

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Wayne Labs has more than 30 years of editorial experience in industrial automation. He served as senior technical editor for I&CS/Control Solutions magazine for 18 years where he covered software, control system hardware and sensors/transmitters. Labs ran his own consulting business and contributed feature articles to Electronic Design, Control, Control Design, Industrial Networking and Food Engineering magazines. Before joining Food Engineering, he served as a senior technical editor for Omega Engineering Inc. Labs also worked in wireless systems and served as a field engineer for GE’s Mobile Communications Division and as a systems engineer for Bucks County Emergency Services. In addition to writing technical feature articles, Wayne covers FE’s Engineering R&D section.