Bayshore Networks announced an expansion of its partnership with GE Digital.
As part of the new collaboration, GE Digital’s OpShield technology will be integrated into Bayshore Networks’ solutions. The expanded partnership aims to address the growing need for secure critical infrastructure networks in industrial scenarios.
An Expanded Partnership
Bayshore and GE Digital first started working together in 2019. At the time, the firms’ joint efforts focused on developing cybersecurity solutions designed to support installations of GE Proficy.
An industrial worker using the GE Proficy Historian. Image courtesy of GE Digital.
For context, the Proficy label refers to a series of tools designed to improve efficiency, production management, and production quality by using a modular Manufacturing Execution System (MES) for process, discrete, and mixed manufacturing.
The two companies are renewing their partnership to provide customers with software, including Bayshore Networks’ advanced cybersecurity technology and GE Digital’s OpShield capabilities.
According to Bayshore, the goal of launching OpShield NextGeneration as an active prevention solution for the industrial marketplace will help the companies secure the world’s industrial and critical infrastructure networks.
The partnership’s goal is to support and protect customers with operational technology (OT) from cyber threats as well as advance their combined technology into a broad range of control products.
Bayshore Networks’ Security Solutions
Bayshore Networks focuses on developing solutions designed to support incident command systems (ICS)/OT network engineers in securing their industrial ecosystems. Based in New York, U.S., Francis Cianfrocca and Vivek Patel founded the company in 2012. It has since completed three funding rounds, raising $11.4 million from ForgePoint Capital and Benhamou Global Ventures.
Bayshore Networks built several security products to address the digital and physical security risks that can compromise the safety and availability of OT environments over the past decade, including OTfuse, NetWall, and OTaccess.
How OpShield plans to protect customer data. Screenshot courtesy of GE Digital.
The company’s products are utilized to mitigate cyber threats, potentially targeting various industrial applications, networks, machines, and workers. Various firms have deployed Bayshore Networks’ security solutions, including GE Digital, Kimberly Clark, AT&T, and others.
Implementing GE Digital’s OpShield
Following the beginning of the new partnership, Bayshore will create a new product line called OpShield NextGeneration, integrating GE OpShield capabilities.
The OpShield devices. Screenshot courtesy of GE Digital.
These will include protecting supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) and ICSs from unauthorized and potentially high-risk or dangerous network activity like unscheduled configuration changes and unscheduled maintenance events.
OpShield NextGeneration will also feature reconnaissance and surveillance indicators, as well as automatic detection of Denial of Service (DoS) attacks, network spoofing, and piggybacking.
According to Sid Snitkin, Vice President Cybersecurity Advisory Services, ARC Advisory, this will increase industrial firms’ overall security posture. Some industrial companies no longer have separated, or “air-gapped,” hosts and applications to keep information safe. However, these systems can still be susceptible to certain OT network attacks.
To mitigate these threats, Bayshore Networks said it would start offering the current OpShield product line to customers in late Q1’21, with the OpShield NextGeneration launch scheduled by the end of the year.
from Control.com