Data Centers

Data centers require operational technology (OT) networks for building management services. These services are vital to maintaining and protecting data center operations, including power and cooling. Physical data center security also depends on network-connected systems such as access control and remote access.

As data centers have become more complex, they have implemented extensive cooling infrastructures to cope with server heat diffusion. A hacker or cybercriminal that can disrupt these systems, even temporarily, can disrupt or demand ransom from the operator to prevent reputation-damaging downtime and revenue loss.

The Uptime Institute estimates that 25% of outages cost more than $1M, and 45% cost between $100,000 and $1M.

Cyberattacks Security Protection for Data Centers

Data Center Attack Surface in OT Security Graph

Data Centers: Attractive Targets for Cybercriminals

Multiple reports of data centers being attacked through their OT infrastructure have been released, including a data center in Atlanta, Georgia, where hackers penetrated their cooling system, causing temperatures to rise above 100 degrees and damaging servers with a ransom demand for Bitcoin.

Networked OT systems that serve the data center market have known CVEs that could be exploited by anyone with access to the network. The OT infrastructure is often protected with the same VPN solutions used to secure the administrative systems, which have been the source of multiple hacks and data breaches over the past few years.

Even if hackers cannot penetrate the data protection in a data center, holding the OT systems hostage and demanding ransom can be a profitable motive for cybercriminals. A cybercriminal with access to the network but failed to penetrate private user data may choose to take what money they can get by holding the OT systems hostage.

Blastwave's Cybersecurity Solution for Data Centers

Data Center OT networks have the same requirements as traditional OT networks, with the additional challenge of highly transient remote access users for maintenance contractors and a very low tolerance for delays in accessing and repairing failures.

OT Cybersecurity Solutions serving this market need to be highly agile and able to grant and revoke access immediately. The solutions also need to support high-performance remote access for solutions like remote video monitoring.

Data Centers that process data for specific industries may be required to comply with existing cybersecurity regulations like PCI DSS, NERC CIP, or HIPAA, which call for capabilities like Secure Remote Access and Network Segmentation.

BlastWave’s Data Center OT Cybersecurity Solutions

Data Centers are a crucial component of a nation's critical infrastructure, running all of the networked services used for operating society. These systems are only as strong as their weakest cybersecurity link, and the OT network must be protected as securely as the IT network.

Blastwave provides three key capabilities that minimize the attack surface of a data center’s OT network:

Image of Data Center, part of OT security

Network Cloaking:

Network Cloaking ensures that data center OT networks are invisible to external threats. Rather than just obfuscating these systems, the OT systems do not appear in any scans or probes from a hacker. AI-enhanced reconnaissance tools cannot probe into the internal workings of a data center because they have no path to reach the internal OT networks.

OT Secure Remote Access:

BlastShield provides OT Secure Remote Access to critical data center OT systems, ensuring operators and contractors can monitor and manage them without exposing them to cyber threats. BlastShield’s phishing-resistant MFA biometric authentication protects against GenAI-powered phishing attacks and MFA hijacking. A full mesh of P2P encrypted tunnels is created to secure traffic from remote users to the data center and any agent-enabled systems, protecting against Man-in-the-middle attacks.

Network Segmentation (MicroSegmentation):

BlastShield simplifies the challenge of microsegmentation by creating simple peer-to-peer encrypted and authenticated tunnels to each device or group of devices without complex firewall rulesets. IT and OT network staff and temporary contractors are permitted access to only the systems they are responsible for, and privileges can be granted and revoked in real-time. BlastShield prevents lateral movement by Secure Remote Access users within the network and can even provide lateral movement protection at Layer 2 for local network connections.

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