ABB, MU DYNAMICS & DIGITAL BOND DISCUSS THE PREVENTION OF COSTLY DOWNTIME AND SECURITY INCIDENTS IN CRITICAL
INFRASTRUCTURE AT PCSF 2008
ABB’s Kevin McGrath, Mu’s Thomas Maufer Host
Presentation: “When Good Traffic Goes Bad - When Is
Application Traffic Too Much?”
SUNNYVALE, CA – August
18, 2008 – Mu Dynamics, a pioneer in helping network operators and their
vendors eliminate downtime through proactive service assurance, today announced
a joint presentation and demonstration with ABB
(NYSE: ABB), a global leader in power and automation technologies, and Digital
Bond, a control system security research and consulting company, at PCSF 2008
on Aug 27. Mu Dynamics director of
technical marketing will moderate the presentation “When
Good Traffic Goes Bad - When Is Application Traffic Too Much?”, and will be
joined by Daniel Peck, Offensive Security Researcher at Digital Bond and Kevin McGrath, Scientist at ABB. The 3 experts will discuss the result of their
research including how too much traffic to one service undermines or
degrades another service operating on the same device, and how malformed
packets propagate across protocols and cause undesirable and unpredictable side
effects.
The demonstration and presentation
details the importance of reliability and availability—in addition to
security—in preventing costly downtime and security incidents in Critical
Infrastructure deployments. Millions of manufacturers, governments and Department of
Defense (DoD) critical assets and infrastructure agencies are actively converting
their proprietary control network systems to IP-based networks. The transition from a homogenous Critical
Infrastructure or Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) system
exposes a former proprietary network to a much larger possible attack surface.
“ABB puts a premium on its products delivering the leading
reliability, availability and security baseline in our customers’ networks,”
said Kevin McGrath. “To proactively build products that withstand all levels of
real-world
traffic, we must test both prior to shipment, and during deployment. ABB’s use of the Mu-4000 Service Analyzer throughout
our software development lifecycle helps us model real world traffic, understand
service response time weaknesses and adverse side-effects. It answers questions such as “if a system is
being overloaded by one type of service-level traffic, what is the effect on
other unexpected traffic to that system’s processes?”
WHO: Thomas Maufer,
director of technical marketing at Mu Dynamics.
Daniel Peck, Offensive Security Researcher, Digital Bond
Kevin McGrath, Scientist, ABB
WHAT: “When Good Traffic Goes Bad: When Is Application Traffic Too
Much?”
The high-level goal of this
presentation is to educate the attendees at this security-focused conference to
be more aware of the broader context around security—namely reliability and
availability—all of which can cause service degradation or downtime,
undermining safety systems or control systems that employ COTS and/or IP-based
networking components.
The session covers:
- The important
relationship of reliability and availability metrics alongside security and
safety, and the fundamental need to thoroughly eliminate software weaknesses
that cause costly plant downtime.
- Why Denial of Service (DoS)
is about much more than just intentional malicious attacks or simply
overloading a link. When do ill effects
set in?
- DoS
situations arising from both valid traffic (too much of a good thing!) or
intentional attacks.
- A demo
of the adverse effects of valid service level traffic (i.e., unintentional
denial of service) and the balance of the time for questions.
WHEN: Weds. August 27 – 8:00 –
9:15 a.m. PST
WHERE: Process Control
Systems Forum (PCSF) - 2008 Annual Meeting
Hilton La Jolla
Torrey Pines, La Jolla, CA
About PCSF
The PCSF is an open, collaborative, voluntary forum of
international stakeholders from government; academia; industry users,
owner/operators, and systems integrators; and the vendor community. The list of
companies represented through the Forum participants is a constantly growing example
of the variety and quality of collaborative input.
About Digital Bond
Digital Bond (http://www.digitalbond.com)
is a control system security research and consulting practice. We have decades
of security experience from the National Security Agency (NSA), National Labs,
large asset owners and leading security equipment providers.
About ABB
ABB (http://www.abb.com) is a leader in power
and automation technologies that enable utility and industry customers to improve
performance while lowering environmental impact. The ABB Group of companies
operates in around 100 countries and employs more than 115,000 people.
About Mu Dynamics
Mu Dynamics
proactively eliminates the high cost of service, application and network downtime. Mu’s solution automates a systematic and
repeatable process that identifies hard-to-detect sources of potential downtime
within IP services, applications, and underlying networks. The award-winning Mu solution is deployed at
more than 100 locations, primarily at leading global service providers, cable
operators and network product vendors. Headquartered
in Sunnyvale, California, Mu is backed by leading venture
capital firms that include Accel Partners, Benchmark Capital, DAG Ventures and
Focus Ventures. http://www.mudynamics.com
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