In recent years, the constant technological evolution has made possible a large number of advances that would have been unthinkable years ago. In industrial environments, one of the latest developments that promises to stand out and is here to stay are virtual PLC.
The virtualization of these controllers will make it possible to decouple the hardware from the software, i.e. the software will be installed in the engineering stations, while the hardware will remain in another area outside the production area.
Energy efficiency alternatives are nowadays on everyone’s lips given the energy crisis that is plaguing the vast majority of European regions. In Spain, the energetic companies are following alternatives based on the use of different technologies to solve problems as complex as such as the management of surplus energy in some infrastructures. One of the alternatives that seems to have greater depth within the sector is the use of Virtual Power Plant (VPP). This new concept of energy management makes it possible to interweave different energy sources into a single flow of electricity demand, managed through a global solution that is usually deployed in the cloud due to the amount of data that has to be processed. The management system proposed by Virtual Power Plant is simple: Take advantage of surplus energy from microgrids to balance supplies to infrastructures that need this energy. With this gesture, large distributors can take advantage of up to almost 100% of the power within all infrastructures, such as electric vehicle chargers, solar farms, wind turbine farms, etc.
Knowing the resources available when performing tasks of hardening a system, will allow us to optimize the time necessary to obtain a safer system. In addition, we have the possibility of using tools capable of auditing the system that identifies those configurations that are considered safe and which ones we could implement.
The programming of PLCs is a fundamental part of the initial phases when building and designing industrial plants. About that environment, the company will base all its operations in that environment making the configuration of these controllers a critical element. When it comes to programming these devices there are a series of steps and best practices that take advantage of the native functionalities available and that involve little or no need to resort to a PLC programmer, protecting the device in a simple way with minimum spend on resource.
With the arrival of industry 4.0 to companies’ productive processes, including IIoT and Cloud, the need to control and monitor the ICS that remotely make them up arises. However, said access points should be established securely and in a controlled manner, mainly due to the criticality of these assets. This article discusses good practices, tools and methods that can be used to establish remote connections to OT networks as securely as possible.
This post presents some lines of action to be followed in the case of having fallen victim to Ekans ransomware. It describes in detail the prevention, identification and response phases to be carried out.
In this new blog entry, we will analyze the features and describe the operation of a new ransomware called Ekans, initially known as Snake, which has a very specific design, aimed at infecting and blocking Industrial Control Systems (ICS).
In this article, we review virtual private networks, or VPNs, one of the most important measures for teleworking, as they allow a connection to the organization through secure networks, and the advantages they offer, as well as additional security recommendations to help ensure cyber security.