ARIA Cybersecurity announces customer deployment of AZT Protect

ARIA Cybersecurity announced a new customer deployment of ARIA’s flagship solution, AZT PROTECT, which works to protect steel plant operations at a mill of one of the largest US steel producers. This large steel producer became concerned that attacks would get through IT defenses into its production OT network and take down critical production systems. The concerns are twofold in the steel industry. Not only can taking down a mill operation disrupt steel production, but it can also damage equipment and pose a real risk of harm to plant workers on the mill floors. Injuries in such facilities can be devastating and lead to loss of human life. The mill deployed AZT PROTECT to its critical production infrastructure. One of the key values of the product, known as Industrial Control System Lockdown, was unexpectedly put to the test one evening. IT experienced an issue with the IT to OT network DMZ firewalls locking up. These types of problems are not uncommon as complex protection rules on firewalls can cause such lockups while adding an additional rule. They had to reset to default mode to get the firewalls to recover – whilst the site was protected from external attacks, a slew of vendor updates flooded into the OT network, before the proper firewall rules could be activated – a potential OT disaster as these application updates will force the critical applications to stop and reboot taking down operations abruptly and unsafely for any workers on the plant floor. Fortunately, AZT PROTECT intercepted these updates and, as its policy was set for full ICS lockdown, it stopped the updates from executing, keeping the protected devices’ applications up and fully operational. The Plant Manager was extremely pleased.