As more legacy industrial devices are being connected to the internet, understanding the security impact and exposure this faces can be vital. By implementing industry standard security measures, you can help defend your network from cyber-attack and gain a visual understanding of your security coverage.
With the recent increase in and awareness of cybersecurity 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 a guide to work towards securing these networks. 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.
To gain Basic, Medium and High Security Levels, the IEC 62443-4-2 recommends implementing the measures described in this table. Content originally from www.moxa.com.
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.
To assist with adoption of the highest level of IEC-62443 conformity, Moxa has developed its “E” series managed switch range. Easy to install and configure, these switches allow the user to implement the highest level of the IEC-62443 standard.
Not limiting itself to just switches, Moxa has a wide range of compliant devices, including serial to Ethernet servers, protocol gateways, firewalls and wireless access hardware that are all IEC-62443 aware.
MOXA products: ethernet switches, device servers, protocol gateways, secure routers
Obtaining an understanding of how secure your network is may seem like a difficult and longwinded process until you discover MxView 2.0 from Moxa. MxView is Moxa’s answer to a Network Management System (NMS) and 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 do a lot, lot more.
The latest version will provide you with a colour coded visual of how secure your network connected device is. 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 you wish to monitor. 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.
MOXA MX Studio software screenshots
About Madison Technologies
This partner content is brought to you by Madison Technologies. Australian owned and established over 27 years ago, the team at Madison Technologies is dedicated to helping partners find practical and reliable solutions for communications and networking challenges.
Madison Technologies is focused on delivering and developing high-quality communications and networking technology that’s built to last well into the future. It manufactures and distributes a range of leading global brands across utilities, resources, transport, manufacturing, commercial enterprise and telecommunications sectors.
View more information about Moxa’s range of cyber secure ready hardware here.
