Bayshore Networks and GE Digital have expanded their partnership to address the growing need to secure industrial and critical infrastructure networks. GE Digital’s OpShield technology will be integrated into Bayshore Networks’ solutions providing industrial cybersecurity and active prevention/protection for industrial equipment, including programmable logic controllers (PLCs), human machine interface (HMIs), and engineering workstations.

“We’re pleased to announce another way we will support organisations who need to protect operational technology (OT) environments, industrial processes, and plant operations,” said Steve Pavlosky, Director, Digital Product Management at GE Digital. “Being at the heart of an operation’s data visualisation, control and reporting, it is critically important to ensure companies are taking steps to protect this key element to their operations. The combination of Bayshore’s In-depth Policy Engine with GE Digital’s OpShield Management Console and Advanced Protocol technology addresses the fact that while companies may have threat analytics or detection solutions as part of a cyber security triad, they must have advanced prevention capabilities.”

GE Digital began working with Bayshore in 2019 to bring cybersecurity support to GE Proficy installations. With this extended partnership, Bayshore and GE Digital will provide customers in all industries with software that includes Bayshore Networks’ cybersecurity technology with GE Digital’s OpShield capabilities.

“Bayshore is tremendously excited to see the relationship with GE Digital expand to combine our joint technologies with the goal of launching OpShield NextGeneration as the premier detection/active prevention solution for the entire industrial marketplace as we jointly work to secure the world’s industrial and critical infrastructure networks,” added Kevin Senator, CEO of Bayshore Networks. “Together, we will support existing GE Digital customers as well as new customers with technology to protect their OT endpoints and networks from ever-changing and increasing cyber threats as well as advancing this combined technology to a broad range of control products from a variety of vendors. Bayshore’s advanced technology brings a whole new level of safety and resilience within the reach and control of plant operations everywhere regardless of PLC brand in use.”

The partnership combines GE Digital’s OpShield security technology with Bayshore’s Deep Content Inspection and Advanced Policy Learning and Enforcement, enabling Bayshore to create an integrated product line, to be called OpShield NextGeneration. Bayshore will be the exclusive provider of this combined technology to customers worldwide through GE Digital, Bayshore, and other sales channels. OpShield NextGeneration can reportedly protect most HMI and supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) systems from unauthorised and potentially high-risk or dangerous network activity such as unscheduled configuration changes, unscheduled maintenance events, indicators of reconnaissance and surveillance, Denial of Service (DoS) attacks, network spoofing and piggybacking.

“Industrial companies will now usually agree that they have hosts and applications which are no longer separated, or ‘air-gapped’ off for safe, isolated operations from the rest of the company or from outsiders and the internet,” explined Sid Snitkin, Vice President Cybersecurity Advisory Services, ARC Advisory. “These types of systems are susceptible to certain OT network attacks. And with the influence of the pandemic, the industrial attack surface and the resulting cyber risk just continues to increase.”

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