is an electronic components production base in Wuxi . It was selected as the "Lighthouse Factory" by the World Economic Forum. A flexible production line that can be combined and assembled like Lego building blocks , whether it is to reduce production line investment or shorten product launch time, digitally reconstruct the end-to-end value chain, giving it new value to "intelligent manufacturing".
Today, when the demand for product is becoming increasingly diversified, a factory often needs to produce thousands of products, which means that it is necessary to coordinate tens of thousands of materials. If a production line is built for some products with small output required, it will obviously cause huge waste. The flexible production line based on 5G technology brings great flexibility to production. The factory can reorganize the entire production line very flexibly according to order needs. It used to take several weeks to lay out the production line, but now it may be recombined in several hours, thereby greatly improving the utilization rate of and the production efficiency of .
In fact, benefiting from the development of emerging technologies such as digitalization, manufacturing in various industries is launching a digital transformation, and industrial Internet has become an important development direction. In particular, the integration of IT and OT empowers and empowers production and manufacturing, continuously drives enterprises and even industries to climb to the high end of the value chain, bringing huge opportunities to China's "intelligent manufacturing".
Industrial Internet, empowering new development
Since the State Council issued the "Guiding Opinions on Deepening the Development of the Industrial Internet with "Internet + Advanced Manufacturing" in 2017, the development of the industrial Internet has been accelerating. According to the data of the first half of 2022 disclosed by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, there are currently more than 150 industrial Internet platforms in the country with certain industry and regional influence, among which the number of industrial equipment connections of key platforms exceeds 79 million (sets) and the number of industrial APPs is more than 280,000. According to statistics from China Academy of Information and Communications Technology, the scale of my country's industrial Internet industry exceeded one trillion yuan in 2021.
Obviously, the industrial Internet is accelerating its construction into a new industry and new momentum for high-quality economic development. The motivation for its rapid development is not difficult to understand. On the one hand, a series of documents and development action plans were issued at the national policy level, which gave the industrial Internet a good development environment; on the other hand, in the context of industrial upgrading, the industrial Internet empowers intelligent manufacturing, digital management and scientific production decision-making through the comprehensive connection between people, machines, objects and systems, and helps enterprises improve quality, reduce costs and increase efficiency, which is a must-see path to enhance competitiveness.
However, this also brings new challenges.
From IT security to OT security, "common and different"
entered the era of industrial Internet. When OT devices gradually "surf the Internet", it broke the relatively closed environment of traditional industries. The internal industrial networks, management networks and the Internet are connected to the enterprise, resulting in a large number of network security threats extending from the external network to the industrial intranet, which means that network attacks can directly reach the production line.
Just imagine what huge losses will be caused if the " flexible production line " mentioned above is subject to a network attack, resulting in tampering with production parameters or even shutting down the production line. In fact, in recent years we have heard that various attacks on industrial networks are becoming more and more frequent, especially ransomware attacks are becoming the number one cyber threat for large manufacturing companies, which is extremely disturbing. How to deal with
?
A few days ago, Fortinet and partner Schneider Electric launched a roundtable discussion on industrial Internet security. In the view of Tan Jie, chief technical consultant of Fortinet North Asia, many advanced IT ideas and technologies have been applied in the OT system at present. Similarly, OT security should also learn from IT technology to plan a security system from methodology, technology and process. This is an inevitable result of the continuous integration of IT and OT, rather than tearing the two apart to form their own independent security system.
Of course, this does not mean that protecting OT security is copying IT security. The integration of IT and OT is "common but different". The industrial Internet directly involves industrial production, and the biggest difference is that it has higher reliability requirements.In this regard, Pei Yuandou, head of Schneider Electric's industrial automation information security business, pointed out that the biggest cost faced by an OT system that can be continuously operated for 5 to 10 years or even 20 years is the downtime cost, so in the real production and operation stage, safe deployment is often particularly cautious.
As an expert in digital transformation in the field of energy management and automation, Schneider believes that OT security should start with the most basic evaluation and audit. Only by clarifying all key assets and the information security threats they need to face, and clearly knowing the traffic and access relationship between the assets can we effectively design and protect. After
, we will introduce security products and solutions in a targeted manner, and only by formulating security operations and strategies can we be targeted.
Fortinet D-team Director Wang Tao gave an example, saying that whitelist technology only allows trusted traffic to be transmitted and accessed on the OT network, which can maximize the protection of production business from being affected. EDR can learn static and dynamic information of terminals in OT networks, such as what is the relationship between an application and an IP address or PLC. This information is manually confirmed and converted into an executable security policy. In addition, since the OT network environment is relatively pure, this gives honeypot a better place to use it. It can more easily capture the attacker's attack behavior, thereby providing security managers with alarm information to check for security risks, and then linking the firewall to block it. Furthermore, micro-isolation can be used to refine access control in the OT network environment to prevent a certain lost host in the OT environment from being used as a springboard, and other objects such as PLCs in the same network segment can be controlled or attacked without firewall protection.
From this point of view, the mature network security technologies and methods used in the IT environment in the past have similarities and even natural advantages to migrate to the OT environment. Of course, on the premise of ensuring compatibility with the OT system and protocol, the impact on the availability, real-time, certainty, durability and robustness of the OT system must be fully considered.
takes the security class to escort the future of the industry's "intelligent manufacturing"
Overall, OT technology has developed for decades, with a large stock market, but there are few considerations for information security. Obviously, the integration of IT and OT has broken this state and has to be done, and the current industrial Internet security is still in the make-up stage. But how to make up for it is necessary to apply different strategies and practices for different OT industries and different OT systems. The widely recognized Purdue model of
has hierarchical division of the entire OT network based on business functions and coverage. For the possible security risks at each level, Fortinet and many OT partners, including Schneider, have built systematic security solutions to meet the challenges of diversity, professionalism and complexity of the industrial Internet.
Of course, it is not a day for the OT system formed by long-term development to make up for security classes. This requires industrial manufacturing enterprises, OT suppliers, and network security manufacturers to continuously consolidate best practices, eliminate threats and risks for industrial Internet innovation, and thus improve the quality and efficiency of development.
faces challenges and looks at the future. As the world's leading comprehensive network security manufacturer, Fortinet will hold the 2022 Industrial Internet Security Development Summit "Digital Industry Resilient Security" series of events on November 16, presenting more industrial Internet security observations and industry trends from a global perspective, releasing more cutting-edge information, which is worth paying attention to. The registration channel has been opened for the
summit. Scan the QR code or click the link below to enter "Elastic Industrial Security".
https://events.fortinet.com.cn/cyy-form/index?pf_uid=29685_2107&id=14528&main_id=29685&wx_id=2107&channel=27855
