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From Smart Grid to IIoT – Higher IQ Means Bigger Risks
Jul 09, 2018
It started off with the Smart Grid: An automated power grid that heals itself and regulates supply and demand, by – among others – introducing two-way communications between countless intelligent devices. Then came the Smart City and other brainy installations and soon the term “Smart” was not enough to convey the level of intelligence required. And so we were introduced to the Internet of Things (IoT), then the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), and a new acronym was born.
Regardless of how we call it, though, there’s still the issue of how we make all those distributed “things” talk. Securely. And with the always-on reliability that befits critical infrastructure communications.
How one simple hack can have catastrophic consequences
Consider the 2016 IoT breach, for example. In that cautionary tale, over a million of harmless consumer devices – cameras, video recorders and the like – were smart, but not protected. A simple hack ended up crippling most internet traffic in the US through a simple distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack.
The urgent need for highly secure solutions in the IIoT World
Understanding the urgent need to protect against such a potential catastrophe in a city’s traffic lights system, power utility’s operations network, or railroad’s signaling control, RAD has developed a secure IIoT backhaul solution. Some of the many powerful security layers we’ve added to it are advanced public key infrastructure (PKI) and IPsec capabilities embedded within the SecFlow SCADA-aware industrial switch/router. We’ve actually prepared a video to demonstrate this exciting new solution, which you can watch below.
The most important thing to remember is that “Smart” must always be accompanied by “Safe”.
About RAD's Blog
We’ll be blogging on a wide range of hot topics affecting service providers and critical infrastructure network operators. Our resident experts will be discussing vCPE, Cyber Security, 5G, Industrial IoT and much, much more.