OT Zero Trust Cybersecurity Protection for Oil and Gas Networks

Cost-Effective Secure Connectivity for Upstream, Midstream, and Downstream O&G OT Networks

The oil and gas industry is facing a growing number of cybersecurity threats. These threats can come from various sources, including nation-states, cybercriminals, and malicious insiders. A successful cyberattack can devastate an oil and gas company, leading to financial losses, reputational damage, and even physical harm. One of the biggest challenges facing the oil and gas industry is the increasing complexity of its IT and OT infrastructure. This infrastructure is often spread across a wide geographic area, making it difficult to connect and secure with expensive, complex cybersecurity solutions.

How can BlastWave Help Oil and Gas OT Networks?

Here are some of the ways that BlastWave’s OT Zero Trust cybersecurity protection solution can help oil and gas customers with their most significant challenges:

Reduced Costs: BlastWave can reduce the costs associated with incident response and recovery by preventing successful cyberattacks. Since BlastWave is more straightforward to purchase, install, and operate than other Zero Trust protection solutions, BlastWave takes 1/10th of the time, 1/2 the administrative lift in terms of management, and 1/4th the total cost of ownership.
Eliminate Phishing Attacks: BlastWave’s Zero Trust approach helps improve an oil and gas company's overall security posture by reducing the risk of unauthorized access through credentials theft.
Secure Connectivity with a Minimal Attack Surface: BlastWave can help reduce the attack surface by limiting access to remote resources through network cloaking and targeted network segmentation.
Improved compliance: BlastWave can help oil and gas companies meet regulatory compliance requirements, especially with an IEC 62443 implementation of Zones and Conduits.

Specific Use Cases for Zero Trust in the Oil and Gas Industry

One-Touch Remote Install: Remotely configure new devices simply by snapping a photo of the label on the remote gateway, and the administrator can configure everything remotely without site visits or IT intervention.
Securing remote access: BlastWave can be used to secure remote access to critical systems, such as SCADA systems.
Protecting against insider threats: BlastWave can help protect against insider threats by limiting access to sensitive data and applying the least privilege access to all access connections.
Protecting critical infrastructure: BlastWave can protect critical infrastructure, such as pipelines and refineries, from cyberattacks even in remote locations.

OT Cybersecurity Protection for the Oil & Gas Industry

Strengthening Oil and Gas OT Cybersecurity

Organizations must develop the ability to withstand and protect themselves against cyber-attacks to achieve cyber resilience. Detecting, responding to, and recovering from an attack is crucial in achieving cyber resilience. Cyber resilience is essential for any enterprise as it provides improved cybersecurity, enhances brand reputation, and ensures business continuity.

The Cyber Resilience in Oil and Gas initiative is a multistakeholder program that brings together senior executives and practitioners from the oil and gas and ICT industries to foster collaboration and information sharing. The initiative aimed to strengthen industrial security by developing various resources and tools, including a framework for managing third-party cyber risks. This has become a critical issue as the oil and gas industry increasingly uses third-party vendors and service providers. The framework helps companies assess and mitigate risks to protect their digital infrastructure and assets.

While cybersecurity guidelines like NERC CIP, NIST 800-207, and IEC 62443 may not be directly mandated for oil and gas companies, they can serve as blueprints for achieving strong cybersecurity.

BlastWave’s Oil and Gas OT Cybersecurity Solutions

The oil and gas industry heavily relies on technology to control and manage critical operations such as drilling, refining, and distribution. A solution that protects their OT network and enables secure remote access is mandatory to keep the oil and gas industry operating smoothly.

BlastWave offers three key capabilities to the industry:

Network Cloaking:

Network Cloaking ensures that critical yet outdated legacy infrastructure such as PLCs, DCSs, RTUs, SCADA, and HMIs become invisible to external threats. Rather than just obfuscating these systems, they do not appear in any scans or probes from a hacker. BlastShield ensures strong OT cybersecurity with the entire oil and gas supply chain. With Network Cloaking, AI-enhanced reconnaissance tools cannot probe into the internal workings of a well or refinery because they have no path to reach the internal OT networks.

OT Secure Remote Access:

BlastShield provides OT Secure Remote Access to critical upstream, midstream, and downstream systems, ensuring OT managers 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 users to remote locations 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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