The Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) has experienced considerable growth in recent years, providing crucial improvements. However, it also has some limitations in terms of consumption, security, cost or scalability. In this blog, we will see how the appearance of LoRaWAN in this area can solve part of those limitations.
The TETRA (Terrestrial Trunked Radio) network is a standard developed in Europe in the 1990s by ETSI (European Telecommunications Standards Institute), whose emergence came because of the management of telephone communications for extreme cases, in which standard communication via mobile might not work properly. Therefore, it can be considered as an alternative network for communications with emergency and security services to be always operational. TETRA unifies different digital radio interface alternatives for communications and serves as a standard for the construction of private mobile networks or PMR (Private Mobile Radio).
Within the industrial world, there are some sectors such as robotics, which has evolver considerably. This has led to the need to update all the regulations and standards, both in terms of physical (safety) and cybersecurity. (security). Given that the robotics sector is and will increasingly become a highly technical sector with exponential growth, the need to update all documentation has been promoted by a large group of companies in the sector, which, above all, have focused their concerns on the cybersecurity of the industrial robotics world.
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.
In industrial environments there are a multitude of technologies, manufacturers, communications, etc. This article will reflect a small part of the protocols that use radio frequency (RF) communications. Thanks to these wireless communications, operators in the industrial world can send a simple order to obtain information on the status of a sensor or execute control orders in the industrial environment. The importance of a good implementation, in terms of cybersecurity of these communications, is quite high since, on occasions, some of the attacks that have been investigated have an impact on the physical world, giving rise to incidents that can even result in fatalities.
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.
In recent years we have witnessed the evolution of the electrical grid and the development of new technologies produce what we know today as the smart grid. This evolution continues to this day and the trend seems to point to greater interconnection between end consumers and the grid, which increases possible attack vectors. Over the course of this article, we shall see the security measures that will be used in the electrical grid of the future.
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.
Software Defined Radio (SDR) is the result of the technological evolution of conventional analogue radio. Its characteristics and operational capability make it a versatile device with both positive and negative applications within the field of cybersecurity.
Wireless communications encompass a set of protocols that are widely used in some industrial sectors. In particular, building automation is based on these protocols, mainly using the BACNET and Lontalks protocols, but also making use of new ZigBee and Bluetooth based devices for IIoT. This article will provide information on SweynTooth, a set of vulnerabilities that affect Bluetooth technology.