McAfee Aims to Protect Critical Infrastructure from Increased Attacks

 
McAfee Aims to Protect Critical Infrastructure from Increased Attacks

McAfee and Intel® Develop “Joint Implementation” to Demonstrate
Situational Awareness and Multi-zone Protection for Energy
Infrastructure

SANTA CLARA, CA -  May 15, 2012 - McAfee announced a collaboration with
Intel to better protect the world’s energy utility ecosystem,
including generation, transmission and distribution, from increased
cyber attacks. The two companies have provided a blueprint for a
comprehensive solution of multiple products that create layers of
security and operate together without great complexity or without
impacting availability.

Solutions from McAfee and Intel deliver a variety of technologies for
securing the energy infrastructure environments, decreasing chances of
malicious attacks, increasing uptime and decreasing resource-intensive
responses to fix and update systems. The “reference implementation”
created mirrors real-world energy infrastructure platforms and
environments so customers can see the technology implemented fully and
integrated across endpoint, network and cloud. The solution is focused
on satisfying the energy industries need for situational awareness,
seamless multi-zone protection, native supervisory control and data
acquisition (SCADA) support, and remote device management.

Joint Reference Implementation
McAfee and Intel created a “reference implementation” that
integrates a number of McAfee security solutions relevant to substations
and network operations centres with selected Intel processors and
hardware-based security and manageability technologies. The reference
implementation emulates the components and functionality commonly found
in a critical infrastructure environment. The added capability of
end-point security, network security and security management solutions
can deliver a secure environment with increased reliability.

The "reference implementation" allows the audience to witness the
system response of an unsuccessful cyber-attack thwarted by McAfee
Embedded Control and the impact of a successful attack on an "improperly
configured" system. The audience can see how the critical infrastructure
operator can remotely and securely mitigate the threat of the comprised
"improperly configured" system with McAfee's ePolicy Orchestrator
coupled with Intel® vPro™ Technology.

Protecting utility infrastructure is challenging for many reasons
including network diversity, data overload, complex endpoint management
and tools that lack the right security context for energy. McAfee
unifies situational awareness and multi-zone protection using
purpose-built, compliance-oriented solutions to prevent attacks in
real-time. This end-to-end security solution features remote management
using Intel AMT to lower device support costs.

"To adequately secure critical systems against cyber attacks, the right
products and technologies must be integrated into the entire
infrastructure - from the enterprise, to the SCADA and control systems,
and even to the automated device networks - without impacting
reliability or interfering with operations,” said Eric Knapp, critical
infrastructure expert at McAfee. “McAfee, together with Intel, has
combined commercially-available chipset capabilities and cyber security
products into the perfect recipe for substation security, providing
advanced protection while removing operational complexity and improving
reliability through remote manageability."

Challenges Facing Energy Infrastructure
The complexity and diversity of the electrical power delivery systems
make protecting them from cyber attacks very difficult. An energy
provider’s infrastructure is comprised of a diverse set of networks
that cannot be effectively secured by simply adding technologies
designed for typical enterprise IT environments. Many of the power
grids’ aging assets predate the Internet revolution and are
particularly
 vulnerable from attack and unable to identify or report
malicious activity up the network chain. Substations, known as one of
the most vulnerable parts of the smart grid, are particularly at risk
from attack. Meanwhile, hackers have grown more sophisticated,
increasing the need to defuse or deter zero-day and more sophisticated
attacks.

Securing electric power delivery is an enormous task because of:
- Multiple zones included: Corporate IT, SCADA, and device networks:
Each different zone has unique technical challenges.
- Coping with “big data” overload: Security devices on the network
produce incredibly large number of logs, overwhelming stretched IT
departments.
- Simplifying endpoint manageability and improving visibility: Energy
endpoints are spread geographically and rarely updated and, many times,
lack the ability to detect or communicate and identify a security
breach. Device failures can be costly especially when they require
updates if not properly managed.
- Providing the right security context for the grid: Standard IT
products don’t have the right features to identify issues within the
energy infrastructure or don’t understand the unique utility lexicon
making it difficult to apply specialized measures need for control
systems.

For more information go to:
http://www.mcafee.com/us/enterprise/reference-architecture/protect-critical-infrastructure.aspx


About McAfee
McAfee, a wholly owned subsidiary of Intel Corporation (NASDAQ:INTC),
is the world's largest dedicated security technology company. McAfee
delivers proactive and proven solutions and services that help secure
systems, networks, and mobile devices around the world, allowing users
to safely connect to the Internet, browse and shop the Web more
securely. Backed by its unrivaled Global Threat Intelligence, McAfee
creates innovative products that empower home users, businesses, the
public sector and service providers by enabling them to prove compliance
with regulations, protect data, prevent disruptions, identify
vulnerabilities, and continuously monitor and improve their security.
McAfee is relentlessly focused on constantly finding new ways to keep
our customers safe. http://www.mcafee.com

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