Octave Cyber Integrity (formerly PAS Cyber Integrity) provides foundation for new program after spin-off
About the company
This agile, innovation-driven U.S.-based electronic materials company produces advanced materials for the semiconductor, display and LED industries. With operations in North America and Asia, it has safely produced some of the world’s most dangerous chemicals for more than 40 years.
Challenge
After a spin-off from its parent company, the company transformed in 2016 from a business unit into a standalone specialty materials company. The new entity had to create — from the ground up and with limited IT/OT cybersecurity team resources — a new, unified, enterprise-wide cybersecurity program across 14 major production facilities in 12 months to avoid a costly extension of a transition services agreement with the parent company.
Initially, the new cybersecurity team felt confident about its understanding of site OT assets. However, gaps in visibility and security controls quickly surfaced. Obtaining OT asset inventory and security posture visibility proved difficult. Accurate control system baseline and configuration information are often missing. Identifying vulnerabilities and patch levels on older equipment was extremely challenging. The team quickly began searching for an enterprise-class cybersecurity solution that could close those gaps and ensure appropriate cybersecurity controls were continuously in place worldwide.
Specific requirements included:
Automatic generation of both an accurate OT and IT cyber asset inventory (Levels 3 to 0)
Efficient ICS-CERT vulnerability and patch management across all sites
Configuration baselines and change tracking
Site and corporate dashboards for cyber risk visibility
Integration of OT asset inventory data into a global private cloud infrastructure for digitalization initiatives
Solution
The team selected Cyber Integrity as the foundation for its new cybersecurity program. They first used Octave Cyber Integrity to automatically build a detailed OT asset inventory for each site that included all installed hardware, software, I/O cards, firmware, configuration and control strategies across their multi-vendor control systems. With detailed inventory data, the team was next able to use Cyber Integrity to identify patch levels across systems, including which were patchable and which were not due to the age of the operating system connected to the control system or the age of the control system software itself. The team then focused on implementing Cyber Integrity change management workflows to ensure proper cyber risk assessment and management when changing control system configurations or adding new systems to the environment. Twelve months post spin-off, the new cybersecurity program is up and running, providing full visibility into the assets, where they are, their connections, and their vulnerabilities. They can now focus on further optimizing their assessment, prioritization, and remediation of cyber risks to ensure safe, reliable operations and protect employees and the communities in which the company operates. The foundational inventory and configuration visibility required for future operational digitalization initiatives, including data lakes, 5G and artificial intelligence are also now in place.
