Indegy Awarded Patent for Active Detection of Security Threats in Industrial Control Networks

Indegy, an industrial cyber security company, recently announced it has received patent #10,261,489 from the United States Patent & Trademark Office for software technology that detects misconfigurations and hostile attacks in industrial control networks using active querying. The patented invention is part of the Indegy Industrial Cybersecurity Suite, which the company says is the first product to provide active and passive detection of threats in industrial control system (ICS) based environments.

Industrial Control Systems use Programmable Controllers (PLC and DCS) to manage processes. Any changes to the firmware, application logic or configuration parameters of a controller, whether caused by human error or intentionally by a hostile attacker, can result in physical and environmental damage.

“This patent recognizes Indegy for inventing the active detection of cyber threats to industrial control systems which accomplishes more than passive network monitoring alone and provides visibility customers cannot do without,” said Mille Gandelsman, CTO, Indegy. “Our unique combination of both active and passive threat detection provides complete visibility into all operational network activity, including changes made directly on control devices that elude competitive approaches.”

The patented invention reportedly is designed to work as follows:

• The product requests that a controller, which controls one or more field devices in an industrial control network, report the code it is currently using.
• Indegy compares the code reported by the controller with a stored baseline version of the code.
• If a discrepancy between the code reported by the controller and the baseline version is detected, Indegy automatically issues a notification.
• Indegy also reduces the number of devices needed to achieve 100 percent visibility since it eliminates the need to tap into every network switch.
• Indegy works in environments that don’t even have managed switches.