New webinar featuring ARIA Cybersecurity and former Pfizer security architect addresses OT cybersecurity risks faced by manufacturers

BOSTON, MA / ACCESSWIRE / January 31, 2024 / ARIA Cybersecurity Solutions, a CSPi business (NASDAQ:CSPI), has warned of the rapidly escalating cybersecurity risks facing companies with operational technology (OT) in the manufacturing sector. In a new webinar, "How to Safeguard Your OT Environment", Gary Southwell, chief executive of ARIA Cybersecurity is joined by Jim LaBonty, formerly Global Head of Automation Engineering at Pfizer Inc. They discuss how current passive and active cloud-based cybersecurity solutions are failing to guard against a new era of AI-enabled attacks-creating substantial financial, regulatory, and reputational risks in manufacturing sectors such as pharmaceuticals.

The webinar, which occurred on January 24, 2024, demonstrates how ARIA Cybersecurity's breakthrough solution for protecting OT environments, AZT (ARIA ZERO TRUST) PROTECT, would stop the SolarWinds attack and other recent high-profile attacks on critical infrastructure where existing defences have failed.

"ARIA's AZT PROTECT deploys quickly, requires no rebooting, and supports the legacy operating systems common in the pharma industry," notes Jim LaBonty. "It automatically protects their production applications and operating systems without the need for security patches."

The webinar covers:

• Why today's cybersecurity solutions need to be augmented in the OT world. Passive solutions are required but are unable to stop zero-day and sophisticated attacks, while cloud-based next-generation antivirus (NGAV) solutions, imported from the IT world, are proving insufficient to protect complex OT environments from the sophisticated attacks. This is leaving OT open to supply chain-based attacks, sophisticated intrusions, and application-level attacks.

• Why constant patching is unsustainable and ineffective? Patching is the only current defense against application-level exploits , but patching disrupts production and only guards against known common vulnerabilities and exposures (CVEs). As patches are only available for less than half the known CVEs at any point in time, and cannot address unpublished exposures, this large unpatched surface is leaving OT production applications highly exposed.

• Why the SolarWinds attack was a watershed moment. Existing IT/OT protections were powerless to stop the havoc caused across the SolarWinds supply chain in 2020. Software-based supply chain attacks of this nature have proliferated in the period since, now running at around 700 per year.

• How "Dark AI" is being harnessed to exploit new vulnerabilities at great speed. Sophisticated attackers are using so-called "Dark AI" to rapidly iterate the indicators of compromise (IOCs) within their cyberattacks, allowing them to become polymorphic and able to bypass NGAV defenses.

• Why OT cybersecurity defenses must prepare for the unknown. For example, security researchers recently highlighted a set of completely new process injection techniques targeting the Windows OS. These were found to be fully undetectable when tested against five of the leading cloud based NGAV solutions. By contrast, AZT PROTECT stops them all out-of-the box, without requiring updates.