Frequently Asked Questions

Armis Centrix™ provides robust capabilities to help you secure your network and reduce your attack surface. Key features include:

• Network Threat Detection: Gain full visibility into network-based threats and indicators of compromise.
• Deep Packet Inspection: Visualize network communications between assets to identify risks and inform segmentation policies.
• High-Fidelity Anomaly Detection: Detect network threats with high accuracy by comparing device activity against established “known good” baselines.
• Simplified Network Segmentation: We help you map device communications and provide automated recommendations to create effective segmentation policies, making it faster and easier to reduce the risk of lateral movement.

MASTER NETWORK SECURITY

The Armis Difference is our unique ability to see and secure every asset in your complex environment. Our key differentiators are:

• Complete Asset Coverage: We provide a unified inventory of every managed, unmanaged, and non-traditional asset, including OT, IoT, and medical devices that other tools miss.
• Rapid Time-to-Value: Our agentless approach and hundreds of pre-built integrations mean you can be deployed and operational in a fraction of the time of traditional solutions.
• The AI-Driven Asset Intelligence Engine: This is our giant, crowd-sourced knowledgebase—the largest in the world, tracking billions of assets. It compares your assets’ behavior to “known-good” baselines to provide unparalleled accuracy in device profiling and threat detection.

EXPERIENCE THE ARMIS DIFFERENCE

Our platform is designed for a fast, easy, and non-disruptive deployment.

• SaaS-Based: As a cloud platform, there is no on-premises hardware to install or manage.
• Seamless Integration: It connects with your existing tools without disrupting current operations or workflows.
• Rapid Time-to-Value: Most customers begin seeing a complete asset inventory and actionable insights within minutes to hours, not weeks or months.

SEE HOW QUICKLY YOU CAN GET STARTED

Yes, absolutely. Armis Centrix™ is designed to enhance your existing investments, not replace them.

We provide over 200+ pre-built integrations with the most popular IT, security, and asset management tools, ensuring a seamless fit into your current ecosystem and workflows.

SEE IF WE CONNECT WITH YOUR TOOLS

Our platform provides a holistic, risk-based approach to protecting your environment.

• Intelligent Risk Prioritization: We discover and prioritize all exposures—including CVEs, misconfigurations, and network-based risks—based on their business impact and likelihood of being exploited.
• Holistic Risk Coverage: We identify traditional risks (like unpatched software) as well as network risks (like the use of weak credentials or unencrypted traffic).
• Accurate Threat Detection: We use a combination of signature-based detection for known exploits and behavioral analysis to alert on any suspicious activity that deviates from a device’s normal baseline.

This gives your security teams the context, evidence, and actionable recommendations needed to investigate and remediate risks effectively.

LEARN ABOUT OUR APPROACH

Armis Centrix™ simplifies and automates these critical functions, saving your team time and reducing manual errors.

• Security Gap Analysis: We make it easy to identify gaps in your security controls by mapping your assets and their posture against established frameworks like NIST and CIS.
• Automated Compliance Reporting: Our platform includes out-of-the-box dashboards and reporting templates that you can configure for your specific internal policies or external regulatory requirements, making audit preparation faster and more accurate.

SIMPLIFY YOUR COMPLIANCE STRATEGY

Our platform creates a complete, accurate, and always-on single source of truth for your entire asset inventory. Here’s how the process works:

1. Aggregate Data: We connect to your existing IT and security tools to pull all relevant asset data into one place.
2. Normalize and Deduplicate: We clean up the data, removing duplicate entries and normalizing the information to ensure consistency.
3. Enrich Your CMDB: We push this enriched, accurate data—including user, classification, and location—back to your CMDB, giving you a comprehensive and reliable view of every asset.

This provides your IT and security teams with complete control and allows for standardized reporting from a single, trusted source.

SEE OUR CMDB INTEGRATION IN ACTION

Armis Centrix™ solves the critical challenges that arise from having a complex and fragmented technology environment. It specifically addresses:

• Fragmented Security Views: We break down data silos between your existing security tools to create a single, unified view of your security posture.
• Incomplete Asset Inventories: We resolve issues with incomplete CMDB records, making it easy to answer fundamental questions about what assets you have and how they are secured.
• Weakened Security Controls: By providing a unified view, we enhance your ability to detect threats, identify security gaps, and enforce policies consistently.
• Compliance Burdens: We significantly reduce the manual effort and time required for internal and external compliance reporting for frameworks like NIST and CIS.

LEAN MORE ABOUT SOLVING THESE CHALLENGES

Armis Centrix™ for Asset Management and Security is a platform that gives you a complete, unified inventory of every asset across your entire environment, from your data center to the cloud. It is the single source of truth for your asset inventory and cyber risk exposure.

The platform is designed to help you:

• Discover Every Asset: Automatically find and classify all of your IT, IoT, cloud, and virtual devices, whether they are managed or unmanaged.
• Prioritize Exposures: Identify and prioritize vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, and other risks based on their likely impact on your business.
• Protect Your Attack Surface: Manage your organization’s cyber risk in real-time to ensure all critical assets are seen, protected, and managed.

Here are six manual and automated network device identification processes:

1. Network scanning tools

Various network discovery tools can help you find all the devices connected to your network. These tools work by sending packets to all IP addresses within a specific range and then determining which devices are active and responding. This active scanning can be disruptive and is known to crash sensitive OT systems and cause unplanned downtime.

2. Network management software

Some enterprise networks use network management software to provide an inventory of all devices on the network, including their assigned IP addresses, MAC addresses, operating systems, and device type.

Learn more about Armis’s network performance analytics

3. Router and switch management interfaces

Routers and switches often have management interfaces that allow administrators to view all connected devices and their IP addresses.
Discover the routers and switches that integrate with Armis

4. DHCP server logs

DHCP servers keep logs of all devices that have requested IP addresses, which can be a useful source of information about all the devices on the network.

5. ARP tables

The Address Resolution Protocol (ARP) is used to map IP addresses to MAC addresses, and ARP tables on network devices can be used to find all the devices connected to the network.

6. Continuous Traffic Inspection

Agentless discovery tools capture network traffic continuously to assess risks and threats in real time. This method gives visibility to devices that cannot accommodate security agents.

IT asset discovery tools automate the identification and cataloging of an organization’s digital assets. These solutions work by gathering information through a combination of network discovery methods (agent-based vs agentless).

IT asset management discovery tools are crucial for modern enterprise cybersecurity, which is marked by an expanding attack surface due to a proliferation of cloud computing, bring-your-own-device (BYOD) policies, and interconnected systems. Operational technology (OT), which used to be isolated in air-gapped networks, has now converged with information technology (IT) systems and introduced new asset visibility and security challenges.

IT/OT convergence playbook for insights on adapting to modern industrial cybersecurity requirements

Enterprises need IT asset discovery as a part of the larger IT asset management (ITAM) process that aims to manage and optimize all assets across the enterprise system. Since you can only secure and optimize what you can see, ITAM always starts with discovering assets and gaining comprehensive network visibility.

IT discovery tools have the following benefits for enterprises:

• Improved security: By understanding all assets within an organization’s network through continuous monitoring, security teams can identify and prioritize potential security risks and vulnerabilities. Asset vulnerability management enables them to implement proactive security measures to protect against cyber threats.
• Increased efficiency: Organizations can use the information provided by asset discovery software to optimize resource allocation, reduce downtime, and improve overall efficiency. For example, an IT asset management system can discover unused software licenses and save business from making unnecessary purchases. These solutions also offer a single source of truth for asset data, helping organizations break down silos that may lead to an incomplete asset inventory.
• Enhanced compliance: IT discovery tools help organizations comply with various regulations and standards, such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), by tracking assets and providing audit logs of all their activity.
• Streamlined planning and budgeting: IT asset discovery provides valuable information that organizations can use to plan and budget for future technology initiatives. These tools also help reduce operational costs by discovering overbilled software licenses, underutilized assets, and unauthorized cloud-based resources.

Asset management in cloud computing identifies, assesses, and monitors cloud instances, cloud-based and hybrid virtual machines, and their contents to protect the organization. That seems simple enough, but it’s easy to overlook or underestimate the need for comprehensive cloud asset management in the growing complexity of organizational assets.

Why is cloud asset management such a challenge? Here are some key reasons.

Cloud assets are located outside standard IT networks and, for this reason, can be difficult or impossible to locate and identify with standard, scan-based security tools. If these instances are invisible to security teams, they cannot be monitored or protected from threats, and it’s unlikely that an incident on an undetected cloud asset will generate any sort of alert for the team to respond to.

Unless an organization can find and monitor its cloud assets, much of its data may be at risk. The global share of corporate data in the cloud increased from 30% in 2015 to 50% in 2021, and “85% of enterprises will have a cloud-first principle” by 2025. The shift from on-premises servers to the cloud can save organizations money, increase their agility, and facilitate remote work.

Without visibility for proper management, more cloud adoption means more vulnerabilities and risks. The Identity Management Institute’s list of potential cloud security issues includes intellectual property exposure, compliance violations, malware attacks for data exfiltration, and insider threats that can lead to a cascade of consequences, including:

• Breaches of data confidentiality clauses with clients and partners.
• Denial of service attacks.
• Brand damage, customer churn, and revenue loss.

Reducing these risks requires a security solution that can identify every cloud instance, cloud-based virtual machine, and hybrid cloud-premise asset. Once these assets are identified, they need to be classified by asset type and software. An effective solution will then compare the cloud assets to similar known assets in a device knowledgebase to benchmark appropriate attributes and asset behavior.

Once that data is collected and analyzed, the next step is to monitor the cloud assets to detect changes in behavior. For example, a cloud server holding sensitive data that suddenly starts communicating with an unknown device outside the organization should trigger an alert and policy enforcement to halt data transfer.

Although technical debt is often used in software development, this term can be applied to any technical project.

In IT infrastructure, technical debt is the implied cost of not maintaining technology devices, such as computers, servers, and applications, at a state where the organization and technology landscape requires them to be. These outdated systems and components are also often known as legacy infrastructure.

In cybersecurity, tech debt can build up from poor cyber hygiene practices.

One of the main reasons why a company accrues tech debt is by neglecting or delaying modernization. Organizations that fail to upgrade aging technology and devices can rack up tech debt since legacy software and tools may not be equipped to handle modern speeds and expectations. Since outdated technology is unavoidable, businesses must consider tech debt in their budgets.

Your organization should measure its tech debt because if left unmanaged, it can grow — leading to decreased productivity, increased costs, and cyber risks.

Your team should be performing a complete inventory of their IT and OT infrastructure to better assess devices and application lifespan — and their vulnerabilities, too. Following this assessment, take steps to combat technical debt by replacing outdated equipment before it negatively impacts operations.

Measuring and managing tech debt is crucial to reducing the chance of an attacker exploiting vulnerabilities in your system.

In cybersecurity, technical debt refers to the implied cost of not updating technology assets such as laptops, computers, network components, software, operating systems, and applications, to maintain a minimum working condition and security posture required by the organization based on the current technology and threat landscape.

Tech debt can create vulnerabilities, leading to an increased risk of cyberattacks. Organizations should take action by monitoring their network and measuring their tech debt. Determining the areas where tech debt arises can help increase your security position.

Measuring technical debt is crucial to lowering costs and increasing productivity. Organizations must track asset inventory to get a better understanding of their tech debt. Use these tips below to help control and measure your organization’s tech debt.

1. Evaluate organizational performance – Companies require complete visibility of their physical assets, their lifecycle, and functions. Evaluate company inventory and determine whether or not assets are capable of managing modern applications and if they contain any outdated hardware, software, or OS assets.
2. Manage asset lifecycle — Any end-of-life or near-to end-of-life assets used to support critical business functions may not be taken offline or replaced without severely impacting the organization. It is vital that organizations assess the lifecycle of their assets and create policies to prevent future issues. For example, organizations may require assets to be no more than one or two generations old— a rule that prevents hoarding legacy hardware in the company.
3. Assess security risks — Review assets and their security risk to the organization. This process should include monitoring for unpatchable critical assets, surveilling unmanaged physical assets, and determining whether their network infrastructure depends on equipment in unreachable locations.

IT Asset Management (ITAM) is the practice of managing and optimizing information technology (IT) assets, such as computers, databases, systems, applications, and networks across an organization.

ITAM includes processes, such as purchasing, auditing, inventorying, and more. IT departments use ITAM to deploy, monitor, track, and maintain software and hardware. For example, it’s a common ITAM practice to assess the lifecycle of devices to determine if and when they should be replaced.

Having a complete (and ideally unified) view of every asset in the IT environment can bring operational efficiencies and better business outcomes. An effective ITAM strategy can help organizations maximize their return on investment (ROI) for technology spending.

The benefits of IT asset management software include:

1. More effective procurement and cost savings
2. Increased cybersecurity and compliance control
3. Improved decision-making thanks to real-time asset visibility

Cybersecurity frameworks and best practices emphasize the importance of asset management because organizations cannot secure the devices and systems they can’t see and monitor. The Center for Internet Security’s CIS Controls, for example, start with a set of Safeguards focused on asset management. CIS Control 1 deals with inventory and control of enterprise assets, while CIS Control 2 targets software assets, such as apps and operating systems.

Dispersed workforces and bring your own device (BYOD) trends increase the cybersecurity asset management challenges for organizations of all sizes. Having more devices connected to the internet expands the attack surface that bad actors could exploit. Digital assets, such as security cameras and wireless keyboards, cannot be managed with traditional IT endpoint security. Complete visibility into unmanaged devices helps minimize risks and vulnerabilities.

A successful ITAM strategy requires a complete, accurate, and constantly updated inventory of all assets—those the IT team knows about as well as those it does not know about. This inventory should include every asset regardless of type or location. That’s why the first step to ITAM is asset discovery.

Armis Centrix™ provides unified asset inventory and management for everything from virtual machines to Internet of Things (IoT) devices, and more. It also identifies vulnerabilities and calculates a risk score for each device, helping IT and security teams to prioritize their security efforts.

As industrial control systems, specifically SCADA and DCS systems, become increasingly available to intruders and adversaries, it is time to look at how we secure these critical assets.

Oftentimes, industrial devices are set in networks for decades at a time. It is impossible to predict what tomorrow’s vulnerabilities and risks will look like, and as yesterday’s industrial devices prove, nobody expected vast interconnected networks across plants, countries, and the world, underpinned by a constant threat vector called The Internet. What was once simply a discussion around processes and controls that maximized output and minimized downtime has now come to include cyber threats against a category of devices that were never built to fend off anything other than the typical misconfiguration or broken valve.

So whereas we were once concerned with discrete actions against a machine, from a favored vendor, with proprietary protocols, we are now faced with an ecosystem of devices, from dozens of vendors, that not only need to interconnect and communicate together but do it in such a way that improves efficiencies, reduces downtime, more safely than ever before.

So as these systems and devices become more and more Internet-facing, security requirements have changed. In-depth and detailed monitoring of low-level activities is a must. Why would an advisory bother to learn Modbus when they can leverage a Windows vulnerability in a device that sends commands to a controller running Modbus? They wouldn’t. But the interconnected nature we are now faced with forces us to consider monitoring activities that were once deemed sacred. And these activities reside within our SCADA and DCS systems that control critical processes and machinery.

Are these SCADA and DCS system operating systems? You guessed it…Windows, RTOS, Linux, WindRiver, and all the vulnerabilities that come with them. This means our operations managers now have to bring a full suite of traditional cybersecurity solutions into the mix to mitigate the threats they never thought they would be faced with.

IT asset management (ITAM) is the process of managing and maintaining IT assets, such as devices, applications, networks, and databases. Cybersecurity best practices require organizations to have complete knowledge and visibility over all assets within their network.

A configuration management database (CMDB) stores all asset data related to hardware and software configurable items (CIs) on the network. CIs are included in the ITAM asset inventory.
The two processes are essential aspects of an IT service management (ITSM) strategy.

The risks of a poor IT asset management program include:

• A lack of data to balance costs and determine an asset’s return on investment (ROI).
• Misallocation of resources.
• Gaps in cybersecurity that lead to non-compliance and breaches.
• Lack of operational asset visibility needed to make accurate business decisions.
• Inability to perform preventive maintenance and automated security operations, leading to further wastage of resources.

According to Gartner, 99% of organizations with inaccurate CMDB data quality will face business disruptions. A CMDB is often a trusted source of information for IT managers. If they receive poor-quality data, this trust quickly erodes, leaving them with manual processes and more chances of human error.

In addition, deficient CMDBs may have missing assets or duplicate assets, especially when data is gathered from multiple sources. Asset relationships being poorly recorded leads to a lack of context and an inability to track CIs and their business outcomes. A CMDB that does not keep its data up-to-date may also result in low asset visibility and increased cyber risk.

Internet of Things (IoT) devices is a term to describe hardware assets connected to the Internet that can transmit data with other devices and systems online. We use IoT technology everyday in both our personal and professional lives to increase productivity and efficiency.

IoT devices are often categorized by either Consumer Internet of Things (CIoT) or Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT). CIoT are IoT devices specific for consumer use while IIoT is meant for industrial use. There are so many IoT devices available on the market that it can be difficult to decide which ones can benefit each company. Popular examples of IoT devices include:

• Smart home devices. Amazon Echo and Google Home are common IoT devices in work environments to act as virtual assistants. Once connected to your Wi-Fi, these voice-enabled smart tools use artificial intelligence to control actions such as adjusting lights, controlling office temperature, and even setting meetings.
• Self-driving machinery. John Deere uses automated driving technology to create self-driving tractors that allow workers in the agricultural industry to become more efficient.
• Home security. Smart locks such as August give access to its users based on proximity. Once the August app detects the August smart lock, the user’s door will automatically unlock. Security cameras like Ring are motion-detecting devices that offer end-to-end encryption (E2EE) for streaming video footage. Rather than greeting outside visitors at the door in the physical world, employees can speak to visitors through the mobile app.
• Internet of Medical Things (IoMT). The healthcare industry contains IoT devices dedicated explicitly for medical use. Some examples include heart rate monitors to track a patient’s heartbeat, devices for remote patient monitoring, and infusion pumps to measure a patient’s vital signs.

The benefits of IoT devices allow industries in all areas to transform business processes and increase efficiency and effectiveness. There is no surprise to hear that the global IoT market is projected to increase from $478.36 billion in 2022 to $2,465.26 billion by 2029, according to Fortune Business Insights. However, IoT devices focus on connectivity rather than security—making them vulnerable to potential security challenges.

Internet of Things (IoT) devices do everything from streamlining or automating tasks to helping improve usability of an asset to helping organizations automatically track their key performance indicators (KPIs) so they can improve their processes and optimize efficiency. But they also expose businesses to increased cybersecurity risks.

As the number of connected devices grows, so does the attack surface (i.e., all possible points where a breach could happen).

IoT devices have become ubiquitous. IDC forecasts that the number of connected devices worldwide will reach 41.6 billion by 2025. Examples include:

• Security cameras
• Smart thermostats and building management system (BMS) devices
• Sensors in security systems
• Smart TVs
• Smart factory equipment, such as robotic arms
• Scanning devices
• Autonomous farming equipment
• Connected traffic management systems
• Digital assistants

IoT device designs focus on connectivity rather than security. And IoT devices introduce unique asset management and security challenges because these devices are frequently unmanaged.

IoT devices are vulnerable because they:

1. Often lack built-in safeguards
2. Don’t produce logs
3. Can’t be easily updated and patched
4. Don’t support the installation of endpoint agents, making them invisible to traditional security tools

Here are some key steps for increasing  Internet of Things cybersecurity.

1. Empower your workforce with security awareness training, and educate your employees about IoT vulnerabilities and basic cyber hygiene measures.
2. Gain full asset visibility. Invest in a security platform that works with all devices, from managed computers to unmanaged IoT and OT assets. Armis Centrix™ capable of discovering and classifying all devices in your network and air space.
3. Continuously monitor your environment for unusual device and user activity without impacting organizational operations.
4. Adopt industry best practices, such as the Zero Trust security framework and network segmentation. Automated remediation and policy enforcements are critical to limit cyber risk exposure.

Traditional monitoring tools are not suitable to secure IoT devices:

• Scans are disruptive and can lead sensitive devices to crash. For many use cases, including industrial and medical environments, this is a big concern because device malfunction can lead to downtime or life-threatening consequences.

• Traditional network security systems have poor visibility into IoT devices. They cannot see peer-to-peer wireless traffic such as Bluetooth (commonly used by IoT devices). Nor can they see corporate devices connected to rogue networks. They are also unable to track asset behaviors for unusual activity.

You can request directly from armis.com. Our experts will show how Armis Centrix™ for Early Warning delivers timely, actionable insights tailored to your environment.

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Early Warning is a key product within the broader Armis Centrix™ platform for Continuous Threat Exposure Management (CTEM).

It acts as the “lookout tower,” feeding proactive intelligence into the rest of the platform. This intelligence enhances our asset discovery, vulnerability prioritization, and remediation modules, ensuring you can see, protect, and manage your entire attack surface in a single, unified solution.

LEARN ABOUT THE FULL PLATFORM

This solution is designed for any organization seeking to move from a reactive to a proactive security model. It provides immense value across all industries, including:

• Enterprise IT
• Government and Public Sector
• Healthcare
• Manufacturing and OT
• Critical Infrastructure

Armis Centrix™ for Early Warning is the ideal cybersecurity solution for those looking to preempt attacks instead of simply reacting to them.

Our intelligence is significantly ahead of public disclosure. Armis Centrix™ for Early Warning has been ahead of the CISA KEV list over 800 times, in some cases providing actionable intelligence months to years in advance.

This massive time advantage gives your security teams the critical window they need to patch, reconfigure, or otherwise harden your environments before a public exploit is ever released.

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By using Armis Centrix™ for Early Warning, your organization can:

• Get ahead of threats before they impact your operations.
• Receive timely, high-fidelity notifications of impending risks.
• Improve your overall security posture while reducing the likelihood of a breach.
• Focus your security and IT resources on the vulnerabilities that truly matter.
• Save hundreds of hours previously spent on manual CVE triage and research.

SEE THE REAL-WORLD IMPACT

While scoring systems like CVSS, EPSS, and CISA’s KEV (Known Exploited Vulnerabilities) list are useful, they are often reactive and lack critical context. Our Early Warning system is different because it is:

• Proactive, Not Reactive: We deliver real-time, evidence-based intelligence before vulnerabilities hit public lists like CISA KEV.
• Broader in Coverage: We have identified over 1,600 vulnerabilities that the CISA KEV list doesn’t include, closing a significant visibility gap.
• More Focused: We help you reduce 98% of the noise, allowing you to ignore the thousands of low-risk vulnerabilities and focus on the few that are truly dangerous.
• Context-Aware: Our insights are tailored to your specific assets and business operations, so you know exactly how an emerging threat could impact you.

LEARN HOW EARLY DETECTION DEFENDS AGAINST ADVANCED ATTACKS

Our platform delivers proactive insights by combining three powerful, real-time intelligence sources:

• Human Intelligence Integration: AI-powered collectors trained in over 200 languages monitor underground attacker forums and conversations to detect vulnerabilities in their earliest stages.
• Dark Web Intelligence: Our proprietary AI constantly scans hidden communities and illicit marketplaces to detect emerging threats and exploits before they surface publicly.
• Deception Technology: We deploy dynamic sensors that act as lures, attracting attackers to capture their behavior and TTPs (Tactics, Techniques, and Procedures) in real time.

This combined intelligence is then contextualized for your specific environment, providing a clear, prioritized action plan.

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Traditional vulnerability management is reactive and overwhelming. With 500–1,000 new vulnerabilities emerging each week, it’s impossible for teams to patch everything. This is critical because 60% of compromises stem from known, unpatched vulnerabilities.

Early Warning is needed to cut through the noise. It helps you shift from a reactive “patch everything” model to a proactive, risk-based strategy, focusing your limited resources on the threats that truly matter.

LEARN MORE ABOUT THE VULNERAVILITY OVERLOAD

Armis Centrix™ for Early Warning is a proactive threat intelligence solution that helps your organization get ahead of cyberattacks. It identifies and prioritizes the vulnerabilities that are most likely to be exploited before attackers can weaponize them.

By combining multiple advanced intelligence sources, our platform helps you:

• Anticipate emerging threats by monitoring the dark web and attacker conversations.
• Prioritize the small percentage of vulnerabilities that pose a real, immediate risk.
• Mitigate threats by giving you critical time to act before an attack occurs.

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Our approach is “patient-centric” because every aspect of our platform is designed to protect the patient journey and ensure the continuity of care.

• Holistic Coverage: We secure every technology asset a patient might interact with, from check-in kiosks to bedside monitors and surgical equipment.
• Risk Prioritization for Patient Safety: We believe the biggest risks are those that threaten patient safety. Our platform is built to identify and mitigate these risks above all else.
• Ensuring Operational Continuity: By preventing cyberattacks and reducing downtime, we help ensure that healthcare providers can deliver life-saving care without interruption.

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Healthcare teams are often overwhelmed with thousands of alerts. Armis Centrix™ cuts through the noise by helping you focus on the vulnerabilities that pose the greatest risk to patient care.

Instead of just relying on a technical severity score (CVSS), Armis prioritizes vulnerabilities based on the actual risk to your organization, considering:

• Asset Criticality: Is this device a patient monitor in the ICU or a printer in the back office?
• Clinical Risk Score: How would a compromise of this device impact patient safety and care delivery?
• Automated Workflows: We automatically assign owners and initiate remediation workflows so your teams can act faster on the biggest threats.

Armis Centrix™ provides valuable operational insights that help clinical engineering and IT teams work together to manage device fleets more effectively.

You can:

• Optimize Device Allocation: See high and low usage data to ensure expensive equipment like infusion pumps are where they are needed most.
• Improve Patient Flow: Track device usage patterns to identify and resolve bottlenecks in patient care.
• Pinpoint Physical Location: Find assets quickly to streamline maintenance, manage recalls, or perform site-based risk analysis.
• Maximize Investments: Use data to make informed decisions about procurement and extend the lifespan of your existing medical devices.

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Armis Centrix™ enables you to implement smart network segmentation and microsegmentation policies to contain threats without disrupting clinical operations.

• Policy Based on Identity, Not Just IP: We go beyond basic IP addresses to enable microsegmentation based on each asset’s identity, behavior, role, and risk level.
• Dynamic Enforcement: Policies are enforced in real-time. If a device exhibits abnormal behavior, its network access can be automatically restricted.
• Works With Your Existing Infrastructure: Armis integrates seamlessly with your existing firewalls, switches, and NACs to enforce these policies, eliminating the need for a costly infrastructure overhaul.

LEARN MORE ABOUT MODERN SEGMENTATION IN HEALTHCARE

Asset behavior monitoring allows you to spot the earliest signs of a compromise. Instead of reacting to an attack after it happens, you can be proactive.

The key benefits are:

• Establish a Baseline: Armis learns the “known good” behavior for every device on your network.
• Detect Anomalies: You get immediate alerts when a device deviates from its normal behavior, such as communicating with a suspicious server.
• Enable Proactive Response: This early warning allows your teams to investigate and mitigate potential threats before they escalate into a full-blown incident.

Armis Centrix™ helps you get ahead of ransomware by shifting your security posture from reactive to proactive. Here’s how:

• Proactive Threat Intelligence: We provide real-time intelligence on the latest attacker tactics and zero-day vulnerabilities, helping you secure devices before they are exploited.
• Risk-Based Prioritization: We help you focus on fixing the most critical threats first, based on their potential impact on your operations.
• Automated Containment: Armis can automatically enforce policies to quarantine a suspicious device or remove its network access, stopping a potential ransomware attack from spreading.

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Armis Centrix™ discovers and classifies every asset without needing to install any software agents. Our unique multi-detection engine combines three key methods:

• Integrations: We use hundreds of pre-built integrations with your existing IT and security tools (like network switches, firewalls, and endpoint solutions) to build a complete inventory from day one.
• Network Traffic Analysis: Armis passively and safely monitors network traffic to identify devices and analyze their behavior, ensuring no disruption to sensitive clinical assets.
• The Asset Intelligence Engine: Our crowdsourced, cloud-based database of over 6.5 billion assets compares your devices against a global library to instantly identify them and flag known risks.

Healthcare organizations face a “perfect storm” of security challenges, including:

• Device Diversity: A single hospital uses thousands of different devices from hundreds of manufacturers, each with its own security protocols.
• Pervasive Vulnerabilities: An estimated 53% of medical devices have known, unpatched vulnerabilities that attackers actively exploit.
• Massive Scale: The average hospital has over 17 connected devices per bed, many of which are unmanaged and unmonitored by traditional IT security tools.
• Expanding Attack Surface: Over 90% of cyberattacks begin with IoT devices. Security must cover the entire technology ecosystem, not just medical devices.

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Medical devices present a unique and critical security challenge. Proactive cybersecurity is essential because many devices are:

• Legacy Devices: Often, devices are several years old and run on outdated operating systems that can’t be easily patched.
• Difficult to Update: Taking a critical device like an MRI or CT scanner offline for patching can disrupt patient care and is often not feasible.
• Directly Tied to Patient Care: A compromised medical device can have immediate and severe consequences for patient safety and treatment outcomes.

 
READ OUR HEALTHCARE THREAT INSIGHTS REPORT

Armis Centrix™ improves cybersecurity by giving you the power to see, protect, and manage your entire fleet of medical technology in real-time.
Key improvements include:

• Complete, Real-Time Visibility: We identify and classify every device the moment it connects to your network, so nothing is left unmonitored.
• Proactive Threat Detection: We use advanced threat intelligence and anomaly detection to identify and stop attacks before they can disrupt patient care.
• Risk-Based Vulnerability Management: We prioritize vulnerabilities based on the clinical risk to your specific environment, so your teams can focus on what matters most.

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Armis Centrix™ for Medical Device Security is a cybersecurity platform designed specifically to protect hospitals and healthcare facilities. It gives you a complete and unified view of every medical device, IT asset, and IoT device in your environment.
The platform is built to help your organization:

• See and identify every connected asset, from infusion pumps and MRI machines to guest Wi-Fi devices.
• Protect and secure your devices by detecting threats, monitoring behavior, and enforcing security policies.
• Manage and optimize your entire asset inventory for better utilization and compliance.

By providing this comprehensive visibility and control, Armis Centrix™ helps ensure patient safety, maintain regulatory compliance, and secure your healthcare infrastructure.

 
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Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) refers to medical devices and applications with Internet connectivity. It’s a subset of Internet of Things (IoT) and, for this reason, is often referred to as IoT in healthcare.

The overall category of IoT devices is typically more consumer-oriented, focusing on usability and convenience. IoT devices include smart TVs, lighting apps, voice assistants—really any number of smart, connected devices. IoMT devices and applications are designed with healthcare in mind, including:

• Smart thermometers and infusion pumps
• Remote patient monitoring (R\PM) devices
• Personal emergency response systems (PERS)
• Heart rate sensors and glucose monitors
• Ingestible sensors and cameras
• MRI machines

Connected medical devices help healthcare workers deliver faster and better care. Use cases range from robotic surgery to glucose monitoring. Benefits of IoMT include:

• Improved treatments and cost savings
• Faster and precise diagnostics, as IoMT technology can track patient’s vital signs in-depth and detail
• Better patient monitoring, without requiring visits to a medical facility

The proliferation of connected devices in hospitals and medical facilities expands these organizations’ attack surface. Medical data privacy is also a concern and subject to regulations, such as the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA).

In addition, IoMT devices have unique cybersecurity challenges. For example:

• IoMT devices are often not built with security in mind and lack inherent controls. And many of those devices in use are based on old and vulnerable software and cannot be easily updated or patched.
• Traditional IT security tools can’t see or secure IoMT assets because the devices cannot accommodate endpoint agents. Scans are disruptive and can cause IoMT systems to crash.
• Device certification requirements complicate the patching process, leading to vulnerability and exposure to cyberattacks.

Limited correlation of security vulnerabilities with safety impact potentially causes issues with prioritization of information security response and recovery workflows.

Often referred to as Internet of Medical Things (IoMT), IoT in healthcare refers to the use of IoT technology in the delivery of patient care. This includes the use of connected devices, sensors, and systems to collect and transmit data for various purposes, such as monitoring patients’ health, improving medical treatments, and streamlining healthcare processes.

Examples of applications of IoT in the healthcare industry include wearable devices (such as heart rate sensors), connected medical equipment (such as smart infusion pumps), and patient communication and engagement (tablet devices). IoT devices — along with operational technology (OT), such as HVAC and other building management systems — contribute to the expanding attack surface in healthcare

The platform is built for large, distributed operations. It supports multi-site deployments with a centralized management console, enabling you to maintain consistent visibility and security governance across all your global OT environments while keeping all sensitive data stored locally at each site.

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The on-premises platform is designed to enhance your existing security investments. It integrates natively with your entire security and IT ecosystem, including:

• Firewalls and Network Access Control (NAC)
• SIEM and SOAR platforms
• EDR and other security tools

Our platform enriches these tools with the deep OT/IoT context they lack, allowing your teams to manage security and respond to incidents using their existing workflows.

EXPLORE OUR INTEGRATIONS

Yes. The on-premises platform includes powerful executive dashboards and automated reporting capabilities. These tools translate complex technical data into clear business outcomes, making it easy to demonstrate:

• Tangible Risk Reduction: Show a measurable decrease in critical vulnerabilities and security gaps over time.
• Proof of Compliance: Provide auditors with concrete evidence that you are meeting security mandates.
• Clear ROI: Articulate the value of your security program by connecting it to operational risk reduction.

EXPERIENCE OUR REPORTING CAPABILITIES

Our on-premises solution includes native Secure Remote Access (SRA) capabilities designed specifically for OT environments. This feature eliminates the risks of traditional VPNs by providing fully auditable, controlled access.

Key security controls for SRA include:

• Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA): Enforces strong authentication for all remote users.
• Just-in-Time Access: Grants temporary, time-bound access windows instead of “always-on” connections.
• Full Session Monitoring: All remote sessions are fully monitored, recorded, and logged, so you have a complete audit trail of every action taken.

GET THE GUIDE TO OT SECURE REMOTE ACCESS

The on-premises platform is a critical component for ensuring business continuity and operational resilience.

• Proactive Risk Detection: By providing complete asset visibility and mapping attack pathways, the platform helps you detect and mitigate risks before they can cause an incident.
• Uninterrupted Protection: Because it is deployed locally, the platform provides continuous protection and visibility even in fully air-gapped networks where cloud connectivity is not an option.

Our platform includes Armis Centrix™ for Vulnerability Prioritization and Remediation (VIPR), which cuts through the noise of traditional vulnerability management.

Instead of just relying on a technical CVSS score, we prioritize based on what matters most to your operations:

• Exploitability: Is the vulnerability being actively targeted by attackers in the wild?
• Device Criticality: Is the device a critical PLC running your production line or a less important sensor?
• Operational Context: Could exploiting this vulnerability cause a safety incident or significant downtime?

This ensures your teams focus their limited resources on fixing the small subset of vulnerabilities that pose a genuine threat to your business.

LEARN ABOUT VULNERABILITY PRIORITIZATION

The digital twin is an exact, up-to-date virtual model of your entire OT/IoT environment. It simulates all your assets, their behaviors, and how they communicate. This allows your teams to:

• Safely Test Security Changes: Evaluate the impact of new security policies or configurations without touching live production systems.
• Model Attack Scenarios: Understand how a threat could move laterally across your network and proactively close security gaps.
• Improve Operational Resilience: Predict the impact of a potential device failure or cyberattack to improve your business continuity planning.

LEARN MORE ABOUT THE DIGITAL TWIN

Our platform uses a 100% agentless and non-disruptive approach to discover every asset in your environment. We achieve this by combining:

• Continuous Traffic Analysis: We passively monitor network traffic to see every device as it communicates.
• Safe Active Querying: We use native, vendor-approved industrial protocols to accurately identify and classify devices, including legacy, unmanaged, or rogue assets, without causing any disruption.

The on-premises deployment is specifically designed for organizations that require full control over their data and infrastructure. It is the ideal choice for environments with:

• Strict Data Residency/Sovereignty Rules: Ensures sensitive operational data never leaves your physical environment, helping you comply with GDPR, NIS2, and other regional data laws.
• Air-Gapped Networks: Provides complete asset visibility and security for industrial networks that are physically isolated from the internet.
• Specific Internal Security Policies: Meets internal mandates that restrict the use of cloud-based security solutions.

While deployed locally, the platform still receives continuous updates from the Armis Device Knowledgebase to ensure you are protected against the latest threats.

IS ON-PREM RIGHT FOR YOU? REQUEST A CONSULTATION

We offer flexible deployment models to meet your specific security and compliance needs:

• Cloud: For rapid scalability, continuous updates, and access to our global threat intelligence.
• On-Premises: For full local control, ideal for highly regulated or air-gapped OT networks.
• Hybrid: A flexible combination that supports global, distributed operations with varying regional requirements.

VISIT THE ARMIS TRUST CENTER

Yes. Armis Centrix™ is designed for the scale and complexity of global enterprises with distributed operational facilities. Our cloud-native platform provides centralized visibility with the local context needed to ensure consistent security policy and governance across all your plants, regions, and industrial networks.

SEE WHO TRUSTS ARMIS AT SCALE

Armis Centrix™ integrates with your existing security and network infrastructure to enable automated, real-time responses to threats. Through these integrations, our platform can trigger actions like:

• Quarantining a device via your Network Access Control (NAC) solution.
• Blocking malicious communications by updating firewall rules.
• Opening a high-priority ticket in ServiceNow with all relevant context.
• Initiating a workflow in your SOAR platform.

EXPLORE INTEGRATIONS

Traditional tools often create overwhelming lists of CVEs. Our platform, which includes Armis Centrix™ for Vulnerability Prioritization and Remediation, cuts through the noise.

Instead of just using a technical CVSS score, we prioritize based on what matters to your operations:

• Exploitability: Is the vulnerability being actively targeted by attackers?
• Device Criticality: Is the device a critical PLC running your production line or a less important sensor?
• Operational Context: Could exploiting this vulnerability cause a safety incident or significant downtime?

This intelligent approach allows your teams to focus on fixing the small subset of vulnerabilities that pose a genuine threat to your business.

LEARN ABOUT VULNERABILITY PRIORITIZATIONM

Our platform excels at finding 100% of the assets in your environment, including legacy, unmanaged, or rogue devices that other tools miss.

We achieve this by combining two powerful, agentless methods:

• Continuous Traffic Monitoring: We analyze network traffic to see every device as it communicates.
• Safe Active Queries: We use native industrial protocols to accurately identify and classify devices without disrupting sensitive processes.

Our platform provides a comprehensive solution for managing the risks associated with vendors, contractors, and remote employees connecting to your OT environment.

• Third-Party Device Monitoring: We continuously monitor vendor-connected assets, flagging insecure configurations or unusual behaviors that could introduce risk.
• Secure Remote Access (SRA): Our built-in SRA capabilities replace risky VPNs with a secure, auditable access solution that enforces Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) and Just-in-Time access for all remote sessions.

SECURE YOUR REMOTE CONNECTIONS

Yes. Armis provides executive-level dashboards that translate complex technical data into clear business outcomes.

You can confidently present:

• Measurable KPIs: Show tangible improvements in metrics like vulnerability reduction, faster incident response times (MTTR), and increased asset coverage.
• Demonstrable ROI: Articulate the value of your security program by connecting it to operational risk reduction and business continuity.

Armis Centrix™ automates and simplifies compliance for key OT and IT frameworks. It provides the continuous monitoring and documentation needed to stay audit-ready.

• Framework Mapping: We map your asset data, controls, and security posture directly to frameworks like IEC 62443, NIST CSF, HIPAA, and ISO 27001.
• Automated Reporting: The platform generates audit trails and reports, significantly reducing the manual burden on your security and operations teams.

SIMPLIFY YOUR COMPLIANCE STRATEGY

No. The platform is purpose-built for sensitive OT environments and will not cause downtime, performance issues, or operational risk.

Our non-disruptive approach relies on:

• Continuous Traffic Analysis: We passively monitor network traffic to understand your assets and their behavior.
• Safe Active Querying: We use native, vendor-approved industrial protocols to safely gather more details from devices without generic, risky scans.

Armis Centrix™ provides a unified security platform for your entire operational environment. It gives you complete visibility and control over all your connected assets—from modern IoT sensors to legacy industrial controllers.

Specifically, our platform helps you:

• Eliminate Blind Spots: See and classify every IT, OT, and IoT device across all your sites.
• Monitor Device Behavior: Continuously monitor all assets to detect anomalies or threats in real-time.
• Prioritize Critical Vulnerabilities: Identify the highest-risk vulnerabilities so your teams can fix what matters most before it disrupts operations.

SEE THE PLATFORM IN ACTION

Armis is recognized as a market leader by top industry analysts.

In the 2025 Forrester Wave™ for Unified Vulnerability Management (UVM) Solutions, Armis was named a Leader and ranked highest in the Current Offering category.

We also received the highest possible scores in key criteria, including:

• Vulnerability Risk Scoring
• Response Augmentation
• Innovation
• Roadmap

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Armis Centrix™ can improve your Mean Time to Remediate (MTTR) by over 75%.

We achieve this by attacking the biggest time-sinks in the remediation process:

• Drastically reducing manual assessment time through automated consolidation, deduplication, and contextual prioritization.
• Eliminating the gap between security and IT with automated ownership assignment and ticketing workflows.
• Scaling remediation with bulk ticketing for findings that share a common fix.

This allows your teams to resolve critical findings in half the time and focus on strategic risk reduction.

By implementing Armis Centrix™ for VIPR Pro, organizations can achieve significant business outcomes, including:

• Improved Security Team Efficiency: Consolidate alerts, centrally prioritize findings, and reduce the backlog of unaddressed alerts.
• Operationalized Remediation: Standardize how you assign, track, and collaborate on fixing vulnerabilities across all teams.
• Proactive Risk Reduction: Transition from a reactive “firefighting” mode to proactively strengthening your security posture based on true business risk.
• Modernized Exposure Management: Build a scalable, efficient program that eliminates blind spots and focuses your team’s efforts on what matters most.

SEE THE REAL-WORLD IMPACT

Yes. This is a core function of the platform and a key driver of efficiency.

Armis Centrix™ automates the entire remediation lifecycle by:

• Assigning ownership automatically based on pre-defined roles and responsibilities.
• Creating tickets in bulk for multiple findings that share a common fix.
• Providing actionable guidance on how to remediate the issue.

This automation can reduce the operational overhead associated with manual ticketing and assignment by up to 90%.

Most tools prioritize using only technical severity (like a CVSS score) and general exploit data. Armis Centrix™ goes much further by adding critical layers of context.

Our prioritization engine considers:

• Rich Asset Profiles: Is the vulnerable asset a critical production server or a developer’s laptop?
• Threat Intelligence: Is this vulnerability being actively exploited in the wild right now?
• Environmental Context: How is the asset connected to other critical systems in your unique environment?

This multi-factor approach ensures you focus on the risks that pose the biggest threat to your organization, not just what looks bad on paper.

Armis Centrix™ transforms your vulnerability management program from a reactive, CVE-chasing exercise into a proactive, risk-reduction engine. It improves the process by:

• Consolidating all findings into a single source of truth.
• Prioritizing the biggest risks based on business and environmental context.
• Identifying which fix will have the greatest impact on reducing your overall risk.
• Assigning the right fix to the right owner through the right workflow tool, automatically.

Yes, absolutely. Armis Centrix™ is designed to be the central hub for your existing security tools, not a replacement for them.

We provide over 200+ pre-built integrations with the most popular vulnerability management, IT asset management (ITAM), and other cybersecurity solutions to enhance your current investments and workflows.

EXPLORE OUR FULL LIST OF TECHNOLOGY PARTNERS

Our platform handles virtually any type of security issue, or “finding,” from any source.

While many tools only focus on CVEs (Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures), modern environments face a much broader range of risks. We ingest and analyze everything, including:

• Vulnerability Scans (from tools like Qualys, Tenable, etc.)
• Application Security (AppSec) scanner results.
• Cloud Misconfigurations from your cloud security tools.
• Bug Bounty submissions.
• Non-CVE issues like expired certificates, leaked credentials, and more.

LEARN MORE ABOUT ORU APPROACH

Armis Centrix™ for VIPR Pro is built to solve the most common and difficult challenges in vulnerability management today. These include:

• Alert Overload: The massive volume of alerts and new CVEs coming from dozens of siloed security tools.
• Manual Prioritization: The slow, manual processes used to figure out which risks are actually critical.
• Lack of Consistent Process: Difficulty in applying a standard risk model across different security domains (e.g., cloud, network, applications).
• Disconnect Between Teams: The communication gap between the security teams who find issues and the IT or Ops teams responsible for fixing them.
• AI-Powered Threats: The inability of slow, manual processes to keep pace with modern, automated cyberattacks.

TIRED OF ALERT FATIGUE?

Armis Centrix™ for VIPR Pro is a dedicated platform designed to bridge the gap between finding and fixing cyber risks. It consolidates all your security findings into one place, automatically prioritizes the most critical threats, and streamlines the entire remediation lifecycle.

Ultimately, it helps your organization:

• Consolidate all security alerts and findings into a single view.
• Prioritize the risks that truly matter to your business.
• Remediate threats faster by automating workflows and collaboration.

SEE HOW IT WORKS

Armis Centrix™ is designed with data security and sovereignty as top priorities. We offer flexible deployment options to meet the specific legal and regulatory requirements of your organization and region.

Your metadata can be stored securely in the cloud or in a hybrid model to ensure you are always in compliance with laws like GDPR and other local data residency rules.

LEARN ABOUT OUR COMMITMENT TO SECURITY

Our platform is specifically designed with OT security in mind. We provide robust security for industrial systems without causing downtime because we:

• Understand OT Protocols: We can passively and safely analyze traffic from industrial controllers and systems.
• Are 100% Non-Intrusive: Our agentless approach means we never have to touch or install software on your sensitive production equipment.
• Provide OT-Specific Context: We identify OT devices by manufacturer and model and understand their unique behavior, allowing us to detect threats without false positives.

SECURE YOUR CRITICAL INFRASTRUCTURE

Armis Centrix™ provides critical visibility into your supply chain and third-party risk by identifying and assessing every device that connects to your network—including those managed by vendors, partners, or contractors.

If a third-party device has a critical vulnerability, is behaving maliciously, or is violating your security policies, our platform will alert you immediately. This allows you to manage the risk from connected third parties without disrupting business operations.

Our platform can trigger a variety of automated enforcement actions by integrating with your existing network and security tools. Common actions include:

• Quarantining a device by sending instructions to your Network Access Control (NAC) solution.
• Blocking malicious traffic by updating firewall rules.
• Initiating a vulnerability scan on a suspicious device.
• Opening a ticket in your ITSM platform with all relevant details.

These automated responses help you contain threats in real-time and significantly reduce your incident response time.

Yes. Armis Centrix™ is designed to be the central hub that enhances your existing security investments.

We provide over 200+ pre-built integrations with your entire security and IT ecosystem, including:

• ITSM and ticketing systems (like ServiceNow)
• Firewalls and NACs for automated enforcement
• Vulnerability scanners and endpoint protection tools

This ensures a seamless fit into your current workflows and provides a holistic view of your cyber exposure.

EXPLORE OUR INTEGRATIONS

Armis Centrix™ uses a risk-based prioritization engine to help you focus on what matters most. Instead of just relying on a technical severity score (like CVSS), we consider:

• Business Criticality: Is the vulnerability on a critical production server or a test machine?
• Active Threat Intelligence: Is this specific vulnerability being actively exploited by attackers in the wild?
• Exploitability: How easy would it be for an attacker to leverage this vulnerability in your unique environment?

After prioritizing, our platform automates remediation workflows by assigning the fix to the correct owner with all the context they need.

STOP CHASING EVERY CVE

Our platform uses an agentless approach. By passively monitoring network traffic and integrating with your existing infrastructure (like switches, routers, and firewalls), we can see and identify every device that communicates on your network.

This method allows us to discover the full range of assets, including “unmanageable” devices like IoT sensors, OT controllers, and personal smartphones, without ever needing to install software on them.

Absolutely. Armis Centrix™ is built for enterprise scale and is trusted by Fortune 500 companies and leading organizations around the world.

Our cloud-native architecture provides consistent asset visibility and security management across all your locations, regardless of geographical distribution. We have proven success in every major industry, from manufacturing and healthcare to financial services and government.

SEE WHO TRUSTS ARMIS

Armis Centrix™ uses a multi-layered approach to protect you from new and emerging threats.

• Platform-Wide Intelligence: Our core platform uses machine learning and behavioral analysis to detect anomalies and policy violations in real time.
• Behavioral Analysis and Anomaly Detection: Our platform profiles every asset and its behavior to detect the most granular indications of potential threats or misconfigurations and prevent lateral movement or full-blown attacks.
• Proactive Early Warning: Our dedicated threat intelligence module, Armis Centrix™ for Early Warning, provides insights into vulnerabilities that attackers are actively exploiting right now or are about to weaponize, often months before they are publicly disclosed.

This combination of real-time internal monitoring and proactive external intelligence allows you to take preemptive action against threats.

GET AHEAD OF ATTACKERS

Yes. Armis Centrix™ is designed to provide clear, business-level metrics that allow you to communicate the value of your security program to your board and stakeholders.

You can confidently present:

• Actionable Dashboards: Visualize your entire attack surface and security posture at a glance.
• Measurable KPIs: Track improvements over time, such as reductions in critical vulnerabilities, faster remediation times (MTTR), and fewer policy violations.
• Peer Benchmarking: Compare your security posture against industry peers to identify gaps and highlight areas of strategic improvement.

COMMUNICATE SECURITY VALUE EFFECTIVELY

Armis Centrix™ simplifies compliance and keeps you continuously audit-ready. We provide the visibility and documentation needed to meet a wide range of regulatory requirements.

The platform helps you:

• Maintain a Complete Asset Inventory: Fulfill a foundational requirement for frameworks like HIPAA, GDPR, and NIST.
• Automate Compliance Reporting: Use dedicated dashboards to track compliant vs. non-compliant devices based on your specific policies (e.g., endpoint protection, encryption).
• Demonstrate Due Diligence: Easily provide evidence of your cybersecurity practices, including vulnerability management, threat detection, and risk assessment.

SIMPLIFY YOUR AUDIT PROCESS

No. Armis Centrix™ is specifically designed to be non-disruptive, even in the most sensitive environments like manufacturing floors and hospitals.

Our agentless approach ensures safety and stability through:

• Passive Monitoring: We primarily learn about your assets by analyzing network traffic, which requires no changes to your devices.
• The Armis Asset Intelligence Engine: Our platform references a knowledgebase of over 6.5 billion assets to understand “normal” behavior without active scanning.
• Smart Active Querying: When needed, we use a device’s native language to ask for more details, ensuring no disruption to sensitive OT or medical devices.

LEARN ABOUT OUR TECHNOLOGY

Armis Centrix™ is the cyber exposure management platform that protects your entire attack surface in real time. In a perimeterless world, our platform ensures you can continuously see, protect, and manage all of your critical assets.

Specifically, our seamless, cloud-based platform helps you:

• See Every Asset: Proactively identify and classify all assets, from corporate laptops and cloud servers to OT, IoT, and medical devices.
• Prioritize All Risks: Consolidate security findings and vulnerabilities from all your tools into one place, and prioritize them based on true business risk.
• Manage the Full Risk Lifecycle: Remediate vulnerabilities and protect your entire attack surface with automated workflows that integrate with your existing tools.

SEE THE PLATFORM IN ACTION

In cybersecurity, UEBA is the acronym for user and entity behavior analytics. UEBA is a practice or solution that, as the name says, analyzes behavior. The goal is to find threats by spotting user and device behavior that doesn’t align with known good behavior for those users and entities or for similar users and entities. Because UEBA tools look at behavior rather than malicious code, they offer security coverage that malware scans can’t provide on their own.

Anyone using devices or assets within an organization’s environment is a user. Traditionally, users were on-site employees using on-site devices or “processes authorized to access an information system.” With the rise of remote work, distributed workforces, and cloud services, users can also be off-site employees and contractors using their own devices or company-issued devices to interact with company data and processes in the cloud.

The cybersecurity definition of an entity includes individual users along with an organization, devicem, or process. An entity can also consist of a combination of these elements. For example, an entity could be comprised of a hospital system’s diagnostic equipment, the technicians who use that equipment, and the operating systems and software on the equipment.

UEBA analyzes data from logs generated by network agents and other security tools, such assecurity information and event management (SIEM). With a large enough data set, UEBA solutions can benchmark good or typical user and entity behavior and then use those benchmarks to evaluate new behavior. This approach to behavior monitoring can help to quickly identify account takeovers and unauthorized user activity.

For example, if a particular user or group of users always logs into a database during a certain window of time each day to do data entry, but one user suddenly logs in during off hours, that unusual login time can be a flag for potential unauthorized access. If another user logs in during the normal time but starts exfiltrating data rather than entering it, the UEBA solution can flag that behavior as a possible account takeover.

Because UEBA relies on logs for analysis, and because most unmanaged devices don’t generate logs, those devices can be invisible to UEBA tools. That’s a problem because many commonly used devices, including connected medical equipment and Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) sensors, are unmanaged.

Traditionally, IT and Security solutions that provide endpoint monitoring capabilities require that an agent be installed on the device to be monitored. These agents will record the local device’s activity from a network, application, and operating system perspective and then forward that information to a monitoring server.

While agent technique is effective, it has several drawbacks: 

1.  Agents must be deployed and managed.
2. If there is a problem with the agent, or it is not running, there will be no data collected from that device to assess risk and threats.
3. Agents can usually only be installed on certain operating systems (Windows, iOS, Linux).

This leaves other device types (IP Cameras, printers, OT devices, etc.) without monitoring capabilities. Without an agent, the ability to monitor all devices, regardless of type or OS, does not have these limitations.

By gaining deep situational awareness on each and every device, Armis assess device security posture and threats in real-time. This includes classifying the device (category, type, Operating system, etc.), providing complete visibility into what a device is, it’s doing, and its inherent risks and threats to the organization.

To assist with the discovery of assets, the Armis Asset Intelligence Engine is a collective AI-powered knowledge base, monitoring billions of assets world-wide in order to identify cyber risk patterns and behaviors. It feeds the Armis Centrix ™ platform with unique, actionable cyber intelligence to detect and address real-time threats across the entire attack surface.

The Armis Centrix™ capabilities allow customers to quickly see, protect and manage *all* devices – regardless of device type. The capability to discover and monitor any device is important, as threat actors are now targeting unmanaged and IoT devices to gain a foothold in an organization to launch their attacks. In addition, without the need to leverage and install agents, deployment of the Armis Centrix(TM) is simple and quick – providing immediate, low-friction insights into Armis insights and the overall value of the platform.

The top cyber threats to banking industry include:

1. Ransomware attacks

Ransomware is a type of malicious software that encrypts a victim’s files. The attacker then demands payment for the decryption key, usually in untraceable cryptocurrency.

The impact of a ransomware attack on a bank or financial system can be severe, and attackers are increasingly targeting banks because of the large amounts of sensitive data and high-value assets they hold. The encryption of sensitive data and systems can result in significant disruptions to operations, and the lack of service, fraud, and loss of personal information may affect customers and the bank’s reputation.

2. Lack of cloud asset management

In a cloud-based attack, an attacker targets a bank’s cloud infrastructure, seeking to compromise sensitive data or disrupt operations. The technology trends leading to cloud computing present several challenges for risk management and securing against attacks. The challenges of cloud-based bank cybersecurity include:

• The use of shared infrastructure makes it more difficult to control access to sensitive data.
• The complex nature of cloud environments can make it challenging to detect and respond to threats.
• The need to manage and secure a large number of interconnected systems and applications. Without proper cloud asset management, cloud migration only increases vulnerabilities and risks.

Check out this case study that details how a global financial services organization was able to reach its target of 100% asset visibility.

3. Insider threats

An insider threat in financial services cybersecurity refers to a threat from within an organization, such as employees, contractors, or partners with access to sensitive information, systems, and infrastructure. These threats can cause widespread damage by intentionally or unintentionally misusing that access.

Insider threats can have various motivations, such as financial gain, revenge, and political or ideological beliefs. They can carry out their malicious activities in multiple ways, such as stealing confidential data, compromising systems, or disrupting banking services.

4. Advanced Persistent Threats (APTs)

Advanced Persistent Threats (APTs) are a new breed of cyber threats that are both highly sophisticated and difficult to detect. They are a growing concern for cybersecurity in banking, where protecting sensitive financial information and transactions is of utmost importance.

Highly skilled and well-funded attackers often carry out APTs with a specific target in mind, usually a financial institution, and are willing to invest significant time and resources to achieve their objectives. The threat actors use a combination of social engineering tactics, malware, and network exploitation to gain a foothold in a target bank’s network and then remain undetected for long periods while they exfiltrate sensitive information.

IT service management (ITSM) describes how IT teams manage their customers’ IT services. Activities include designing, creating, developing, delivering, and supporting IT services. ITSM leads to increased efficiency and productivity while achieving customer satisfaction and business goals.

A configuration management database (CMDB) is a repository of information about your IT environment, including configuration items (CI) such as your hardware and software assets. This data warehouse gives organizations visibility to understand their critical assets and their relationships. Given a CMDB’s importance to an ITSM strategy, it is often called the “heart of ITSM.”

CMDBs track and store configuration items, providing organizations with the necessary information to make more efficient and effective decisions for ITSM processes. The data is aggregated from multiple sources to give businesses a complete and accurate visual of their IT environment.

Organizations can use discovery and import tools to identify CIs and populate them into the CMDB. After data is collected and loaded in the CMDB, ITSM tools and processes can access and decipher the information.

However, CMDBs may contain an overwhelming amount of data that may be difficult for a user to filter and consume. ITSM tools can sort, filter, and present the CMDB data to users in a way that is easier to understand based on the specific operational problem the user is attempting to solve.

Some core ITSM processes include service request, knowledge, IT asset, and incident management. CMDBs are often the core of an organization’s ITSM strategy since they contain a library of data around CIs.

Using a CMDB can help:

• Planning — CMDBs help organize and track relationships between configuration items, reducing the number of clerical, process, and programming errors. CMDBs can help assess risk management since organizations can view the most vulnerable assets on their servers, allowing organizations to manage their IT assets better
• Operating — The information on a CMDB can inform organizations of any unauthorized software. IT managers are more in charge of their IT environments and can act accordingly based on the data provided. CMDBs help with root-cause analysis because it helps teams get to the source quickly.
• Accounting — CMDBs assist with billing statements and finances, a crucial responsibility in all organizations.

Cyber hygiene, also known as cybersecurity hygiene, is a set of practices focused on regularly maintaining the health and security of an organization’s users, devices, networks, and data. Cyber hygiene aims to keep confidential information safe and secure from potential cyber threats and attacks.

Lack of cyber hygiene puts businesses at risk of cyberattacks, which can lead to massive financial losses, stolen and lost data, and a damaged reputation.

All team members must do their best to help prevent data loss and protect digital identities. In fact, 74% of breaches involved the human element, according to Verizon’s 2023 Data Breach Investigations Report. Human negligence includes reusing passwords, falling for phishing attempts, misusing organizational resources, and more. A cybercriminal only requires a set of login credentials from one employee to cause a security breach and put the entire organization at risk.

Humans aren’t the only victims of an attack. IoT devices are vulnerable to hacking incidents and require security and monitoring. A cybersecurity management platform can give organizations the visibility needs to take control of their devices.

Examples of some good cyber hygiene practices include:

• Ensure operating systems, applications, and libraries are kept up to date and patched for vulnerabilities.
• Remove end-of-life or end-of-support software from your assets.
• Ensure endpoint protection software is deployed and functioning correctly on all organizational assets.
• Ensure vulnerability assessment programs have coverage of all assets.
• Continually assess security controls for effectiveness.
• Carrying out security awareness training to educate employees and ensure they follow best practices.

SOC stands for security operations center. SOC is a team or facility dealing with security issues within an organization. The goal is to detect, assess, and respond to security threats, increasing the organization’s resilience and helping to meet regulatory requirements.

There are different models for a SOC strategy, from in-house operations to outsourced resources. Large companies might have a dedicated facility where the SOC team supervises the site and controls access, alarms, vehicle barriers, and video surveillance. Other organizations might have only a team with specific security roles. Not all organizations have a 24/7 SOC because it requires specialized staffing and significant investments.

In cybersecurity, SOC focuses on protecting digital assets from cyber threats to prevent data breaches and business disruptions. Some of the specific functions include:

• Monitoring systems, networks, devices, databases, internet traffic, and users.
• Detecting cyber incidents and responding to issues as they arise.
• Investigating and validating reported threats to discard false positives.
• Implementing security measures and best practices, such as patch management.

SOC benefits in cybersecurity include:

• More control over the organization’s digital assets, contributing to better compliance.
• Improved risk management with real-time threat detection and response.

A successful SOC implementation has people, processes, and technology as its pillars. You’ll need to:

• Develop a cybersecurity strategy — a critical step is securing leadership buy-in for identified projects.
• Hire security professionals with the skill set required for technical and leadership roles and responsibilities. You’ll need a team of engineers and analysts to analyze data, track down threats, handle, or escalate incidents.
• Determine which technology to use to shield your organization from cyber threats. Your tech stack might include asset management software, security monitoring tools, threat detection solutions, and incident management platforms.
• Establish the processes and procedures on how an incident is detected, investigated, escalated, and remediated.
• Ensure your organization has an incident response and disaster recovery plan in place.

In cybersecurity, an effective SOC requires continuous monitoring of your network and digital assets. To detect vulnerabilities and threats, organizations need security tools capable of unified asset discovery and ongoing behavioral analysis of every type of device in your environment.

Attack surface is the sum of different attack vectors an unauthorized user can use to breach a network or system.

An attack vector is the method, path, or scenario that a cyberattacker can exploit to gain entry to an IT system. Examples of some common attack vectors include phishing, malware, compromised passwords, encryption issues, and unpatched software.

Examples of an attack surface in cybersecurity include:

• Digital. The digital attack surface includes all hardware and software associated with the organization’s network, such as websites, applications, code, servers etc.
• Physical. All devices such as desktop computers, laptops, hard drives, mobile phones, and any other physical gadget the organization uses would fall under the physical attack surface.
• Social Engineering. This attack surface focuses on your team members. Social engineering attacks use human psychology to exploit their victims to share sensitive information.

The latest cybersecurity statistics show that an unsecured system connected to the internet can be a target of more than 2,000 cyber attacks each day. By defining your organization’s attack surface, you can help protect yourself and your team from an attacker breaching your network.

Use these steps below to define your attack surface area:

1. Identify vulnerabilities — Look at the three major attack surfaces: digital, physical, and social engineering. Create a list of all potential attack vectors.
2. Understand types and permissions — Review which team members have access to each point in your network. Consider user types and determine which users need access to specific areas in your system. Restrict access to areas based on each member’s role.
3. Measure vector risk — After reviewing your company’s cyber attack surface and identifying the attack vectors, determine which areas are at the highest risk. Your team should prioritize these areas.
4. Create an action plan — Once you have identified the high-priority attack vectors, create a plan in response to a threat. Answer questions such as:
   1. How will your company know when there is a breach?
   2. Who needs to be notified once a breach has been identified?
   3. What steps need to be taken to limit the amount of damage?

In cybersecurity, the attack surface is the sum of attack vectors, the different entry points where a cyberattacker can try to enter data to or extract data from an environment. A high number of attack vectors means that an unauthorized user has more opportunities to breach a network.

In order to increase their cyber resilience, organizations should take steps to reduce their attack surface.

Use these tips to reduce the number of attack vectors available:

• Enable a zero trust policy — With zero trust, users are continuously authenticated and authorized before granted permissions to applications and data. Zero trust eliminates implicit trust and requires constant verification at every digital interaction.
• Managing users’ access and permissions — Enable the principle of least privilege (PoLP) in the workplace and restrict employees’ access to the bare minimum needed for them to complete a task. Use role-based access controls to ensure that information is only accessible to the necessary users.
• Isolate your network — Network segmentation is a security technique that divides a network into subnetworks. Compartmentalizing can prevent lateral movement and mitigate the effects of a data breach.
• Review and monitor traffic patterns — Continuously monitor your organization’s attack surface. Surveilling for vulnerabilities can help organizations proactively address potential security gaps before they are exploited.
• Regularly cleaning and updating outdated code and software — Outdated software is more vulnerable to attacks. Teams must have a patch management strategy to correct any vulnerabilities in software. This practice ensures that devices in your environment are not susceptible to exploitation.
• Train your team — Knowledgeable employees are the first defense line in cybersecurity. Implement good cyber hygiene practices to help them stay diligent and recognize signs of an attack through phishing emails and social engineering.

Multiprotocol label switching (MPLS) is a telecommunications network technology that routes traffic using the shortest path based on predetermined “labels,” instead of network destination addresses, to handle forwarding over private wide area networks.

MPLS enhances Ethernet connectivity and drastically improves traffic speed, limiting the amount of user downtime when connected to the network. Organizations use MPLS to handle forwarding over private wide area networks. For example, companies with several remote locations require MPLS to access a data center at the organization’s headquarters or another remote office.

There are several advantages to MPLS:

• Consistent network performance — Fewer hurdles allow more efficient data transmission, less network congestion, and less likelihood of crashing.
• Simplified operational appearance — MPLS hides the network’s complexity from devices and users.
• Improved user experience — MPLS supports a range of access technologies. Organizations can choose from different types of services such as voice over Internet protocol (VoIP).
• Secure transport mode — MPLS is a virtual private network (VPN), which makes it not vulnerable to denial-of-service attacks.

MPLS is not always the better option. Below are reasons why some organizations may avoid MPLS:

• Expensive — MPLS is typically high in costs due to high bandwidth, performance, and competitive service level agreements (SLAs).
• Less accessible — MPLS is not optimized for cloud applications or SaaS, limiting its accessibility in organizations.
• Higher maintenance levels — Organizations must carry out maintenance through an Internet service provider (ISP).

According to Verizon’s 2023 Data Breach Investigations Report, 74% of all data breaches involve human interaction. IT managers and DevOps teams should seek cybersecurity strategies and risk management solutions to protect their businesses and strengthen their corporate network security. Lack of securi​​ty measures lead to increased attack surface and cyber threats. As a result, companies may face:

• A damaged reputation. A data breach can cause detrimental harm to your business since customers and stakeholders may no longer want to conduct services with a company that lacks proper enterprise security strategies.
• Financial losses. The average data breach cost was $4.45 million in 2023, according to IBM. A data breach can cost even more depending on variables such as the number of compromised user accounts and expenses from legal ramifications.
• Compromised data. Data leaks can lead to stolen or compromised data. Cybercriminals may sell your stolen credentials and other digital assets on the dark web.
• Regulatory Audit. If the breach is significant enough, there is the possibility that the impacted organization may be faced with regulatory scrutiny and potential files if it is determined that the organization has been non-compliant.

1. Prioritize and Scope
2. Orient
3. Create a Current Profile
4. Conduct a Risk Assessment
5. Create a Target Profile
6. Determine, Analyze and Prioritize Gaps
7. Implement Action Plan

Step 1 – Prioritize and Scope: Identifying organizational objectives will help define what is in scope and priorities. Prioritizing certain objectives above others doesn’t mean they fall by the wayside. Once the highest priority systems and assets are protected, lower-priority ones can be addressed systematically until all systems and assets are accounted for.

Step 2 – Orient: Understanding the processes, systems, and components that are within the scope, as well as the regulatory and compliance they are beholden, helps to understand the posture of the risk, threats, and vulnerabilities that need to be addressed.

Step 3 – Create a Current State: Understanding the current state of affairs will help focus efforts on where to start and which gaps are the widest. One may find out certain components and systems are close to ideal, while others may lag significantly.

Step 4 – Risk Assessment: To confirm a perceived ‘current state,’ engaging in third-party risk assessments will verify an organization’s understanding of existing systems and their vulnerabilities and risk posture. A risk assessment is meant to highlight areas of deficiencies as well as areas of strength.

Step 5 – Create a Desired State: With the help of the NIST CSF, systems and components and their acceptable risk objectives can be tracked over time to allow us to score postures and improvements.

Step 6 – Prioritize the Gaps: When we determine the gaps between the current and desired states, you can analyze the gaps that exist and prioritize those gaps for focused attention. This allows us to correlate resources, budgets, and levels of efforts and acts as a springboard or starting point to tackle the most egregious gaps first.

Step 7 – Implement an Action Plan: If executed properly, steps 1-6 should lead to an actionable plan of attack. High priority gaps found within critical systems and components, with high degrees of risk leading to undesirable impact to the organization, if present, should be clear and ready for remediation.

When followed continuously over time and modified according to the organization’s current state, it will greatly improve the overall security posture of any organization, large or small.

The NIST cyber security framework provides policy and guidance for private sector companies within the United States to prevent, detect, and respond to cyber threats. Depending upon the complexity of the organization, a properly developed NIST framework can be completed in several months to several years. In 2021, Gartner notes that predicts upwards of 50% of organizations have aligned with NIST, including organizations in all 16 noted critical industries.

To develop a shared understanding of cyber risks that face our organizations, NIST provides a common language that can be shared within all levels and functions of an organization.

Perhaps the most important, and cornerstone component of NIST is Identification, for subsequent functions are simply only as valuable as the accuracy of Identification. When we speak of identification, there are several components that must be properly cataloged in order to confidently move on to Protection. Identifying assets, governance, compliance, risk, regulatory components, and supply chain inputs all factor into the overall business environment a company operates within.

Our cyber and operational teams are then tasked with Protecting the assets identified, which includes proper identity management, training, data security, boundary creation, and the proper procedures and tenants in which the organization must follow to protect assets, both physical and digital.

Once the framework has been agreed upon and put in place to add layers of protection, a robust, real-time, and continuous detection practice to monitor for anomalies, breaches, and security events must be implemented in such a way that is both actionable and manageable. Parsing through thousands of logged alerts may be detrimental when most are false–positive or inconsequential, and the few meaningful events are lost in the noise. Distilling alerts by understanding critical assets and their alerts that require actionable steps will go a long way to focusing SOC efforts on tasks that are meaningful.

Knowing that at some point, there will be a breach goes a long way when planning on the appropriate response, such as a ransomware attack. A breach is bad enough, but not having a plan for how to respond only compounds the issues. Asking the question ‘What should our response be under various circumstances’ will help tremendously.

Lastly, there is the recovery stage, where we do our postmortem analysis review of functions 1-4 above. When combined with periodic penetration testing, all stages and functions of the NIST Framework should continuously be reviewed and revisited as faces change, protection and detection tools evolve, and our response efforts and efficacy can always strive to be better.

The great part of the NIST Framework is that all 5 functions are outcome-driven, and metrics can be put in place to track any organization’s journey throughout the process.

The NIST Cybersecurity Framework (NIST CSF) provides a multi-step process to implement what is known as best practices when protecting our assets and infrastructure.

NIST has detailed 5 critical functions that need adherence:

• Identify
• Protect
• Detect
• Respond
• Recover

1. Prioritize and Scope
2. Orient
3. Create a Current Profile
4. Conduct a Risk Assessment
5. Create a Target Profile
6. Determine, Analyze and Prioritize Gaps
7. Implement Action Plan

Step 1 – Prioritize and Scope: Identifying organizational objectives will help define what is in scope and priorities. Prioritizing certain objectives above others doesn’t mean they fall by the wayside. Once the highest priority systems and assets are protected, lower-priority ones can be addressed systematically until all systems and assets are accounted for.

Step 2 – Orient: Understanding the processes, systems, and components that are within the scope, as well as the regulatory and compliance they are beholden, helps to understand the posture of the risk, threats, and vulnerabilities that need to be addressed.

Step 3 – Create a Current State: Understanding the current state of affairs will help focus efforts on where to start and which gaps are the widest. One may find out certain components and systems are close to ideal, while others may lag significantly.

Step 4 – Risk Assessment: To confirm a perceived ‘current state,’ engaging in third-party risk assessments will verify an organization’s understanding of existing systems and their vulnerabilities and risk posture. A risk assessment is meant to highlight areas of deficiencies as well as areas of strength.

Step 5 – Create a Desired State: With the help of the NIST CSF, systems and components and their acceptable risk objectives can be tracked over time to allow us to score postures and improvements.

Step 6 – Prioritize the Gaps: When we determine the gaps between the current and desired states, you can analyze the gaps that exist and prioritize those gaps for focused attention. This allows us to correlate resources, budgets, and levels of efforts and acts as a springboard or starting point to tackle the most egregious gaps first.

Step 7 – Implement an Action Plan: If executed properly, steps 1-6 should lead to an actionable plan of attack. High priority gaps found within critical systems and components, with high degrees of risk leading to undesirable impact to the organization, if present, should be clear and ready for remediation.

When followed continuously over time and modified according to the organization’s current state, it will greatly improve the overall security posture of any organization, large or small.

The US government formed the National Institute of Standards and Technology, or NIST Cybersecurity Framework to protect the nation’s most critical assets, defined by NIST SP 800-30, Rev. 1 “system and assets, whether physical or virtual, are so vital to the United States that the incapacity or destruction of such systems and assets would have a debilitating impact on security, national economic security, national public health or safety, or any combination of those matters.”

Information about systems and components is not only vital to improving efficiency, uptime, and competitiveness, it is also vital to ensuring the overall safety of our industrial control systems, which means safety to our operators, machinists, and society in general.

As industrial control systems (ICS) become interconnected throughout our enterprises, as IT is, we are faced with more and more vectors of potential intrusion affecting these critical systems and assets. Traditional ICS environments, by nature, were left to their own devices as the main culprit to system downtime and intrusion was that of a physical breach and/or human error and sabotage.

Today’s systems are vast networks of interconnected devices surrounded by a circling adversary called the Internet. No longer do we need to encircle our ICS with physical security such as fencing and deadbolts. We are now tasked with ICS threat vectors akin to what our IT counterparts have faced for decades. And with the onslaught of ransomware and nation-state attacks on our critical infrastructure, think electrical grid, oil and gas pipelines, water treatment plants, a revisit of NIST for both IT and ICS systems is warranted.

It is important to note that the NIST Framework is not simply a checklist of ciphers to implement. As every organization’s deployment of systems and components varies, NIST offers a framework to follow, a guide or sherpa, so to speak, on how to assess risk, stressing the importance of cross-functional buy-in across the entire organization to understand its risk posture better and to form an operational culture that addresses the overall cyber risk of the organization’s most critical assets.

Based on the tenets of Zero Trust from the NIST 800-207 guidelines of ZTA, you can use the action items below to begin implementing a Zero Trust security model at your business.

Define the attack surface

Assess your network and focus your attention on the attack surface, all areas where an unauthorized user may try to enter or steal data from your network. Examine the areas that require protection and the vulnerable assets that can expose your organization to cyber threats. Implement firewalls and divide your network into subnetworks via network segmentation to limit the attack radius of a potential cyber threat.

Verify employee identities and network access

Apply the principle of least privilege (PoLP) by limiting user access controls to the minimum required to do their jobs. In addition, enforce Zero Trust policies such as implementing multi-factor authentication (MFA) at every access point. Face, fingerprint, and voice biometrics make it harder for unauthorized outsiders to gain access to your Zero Trust network.

Track digital assets

Organizations should continuously monitor all devices for threats and be aware of what assets are in their library. Track physically connected appliances and assets in real time.  Complete visibility for devices and users is critical to the Zero Trust approach.

Monitor traffic in real time

Track and monitor traffic reports in real time to understand the difference between normal and abnormal activity. Continuous monitoring with a platform like Armis can notify your team of anything out of the ordinary.

Zero Trust is a cybersecurity model that requires all users, inside or outside an organization, to be authorized and authenticated at every stage of digital interaction. A Zero Trust policy requires constant validation to reduce the number of cyberattacks by unauthorized users attempting to access organizational resources.

According to Microsoft’s Zero Trust Adoption Report 2021, 96% of security decision-makers said that Zero Trust architecture is critical to their organization’s success. Additionally, 73% of respondents expect their Zero Trust budget to increase in the next two years.

In implementing a CSF, the organization must have high confidence levels in its “identify” phase to ensure the minimal potential for risk blindspots that would negate the desired effect and purpose of implementing a CSF. Gathering information about the assets that compromise the provision of the essential service is the first step in preparing the organization’s risk assessment; it is the first step, but it is also a vital step as it shapes the decisions and direction of the organization.

Having a high level of confidence in this first step can be determined by a maturity curve in discovering and identifying all the assets in the organization’s estate. Basic capabilities in asset discovery are often manual processes and static lists, such as an annual asset audit conducted by a few individuals who record the findings in a spreadsheet, moving along the capability curve, the next stage and the most common level of maturity, is a mix of spreadsheet lists with active scans of specified network ranges recording the responses from assets occupying those IP ranges. Unfortunately, neither of these capability levels empower a comprehensive and diligent risk assessment as part of a cyber Security Framework implementation.

Often the driving force behind an organization looking to implement a CSF is some form of regulation or legislation, which at its core seeks to increase the level of cyber resilience in its purview by advocating appropriate and proportionate security controls which the CSF itself has interpreted.

If an organization considers that it is appropriate and proportionate to discover devices in mission-critical and environments where public safety is at stake, without increasing the risk to the organization during the process of discovery, or if the organization believes that they may be a target for sophisticated threats, such as ransomware or even nation state-level actors, then they may consider that a passive asset discovery method that operates in real-time to catalog the digital estate regardless of preexisting beliefs in what the extent of the estate might be, and without increasing the potential for negative consequences a more appropriate and proportionate approach to building their risk assessment.

A continuously optimized passive approach to asset discovery and management is considered the state-of-the-art methodology for the Identify stage in a Cyber Security Framework because of the high levels of confidence and certainty into the secondary risk assessment phase.

The CIS Critical Security Controls (CIS Controls) are a set of actionable best practices that organizations should prioritize to improve their cybersecurity posture. Formerly known as the SANS Critical Security Controls (SANS Top 20 Controls), these guidelines are now published by the Center for Internet Security (CIS).

An international community of experts updates the list of controls periodically. In its current version 8, as of May 2021, there are 18 controls divided by activities.

1. Data Protection
2. Secure Configuration of Enterprise Assets and Software
3. Account Management
4. Access Control Management
5. Continuous Vulnerability Management
6. Audit Log Management
7. Email Web Browser and Protections
8. Malware Defenses
9. Data Recovery
10. Network Infrastructure Management
11. Network Monitoring and Defense
12. Security Awareness and Skills Training
13. Service Provider Management
14. Application Software Security
15. Incident Response Management
16. Penetration Testing

Within each CIS Control, three Implementation Groups (IGs)  help enterprises understand the security measures to be prioritized based on their resources and risk profile.

Zero Trust is a security model that seeks to prevent malicious actors from breaching your network and moving laterally across it.

Per the Department of Defense (DOD) Zero Trust Reference Architecture, “The foundational tenet of the Zero Trust Model is that no actor, system, network, or service operating outside or within the security perimeter is trusted.”

This cybersecurity framework requires continuous verification and monitoring of all devices, users, and systems on a network.

Initially developed by Forrester, the Zero Trust framework has seven pillars:

• Devices
• Networks
• Visibility and analytics
• Security automation and orchestration
• Data
• People
• Workloads

Zero trust principles include:

• Asset inventory and continuous monitoring
• Stronger user identification, including multifactor authentication and least privilege requirements
• Network segmentation

Following the Zero Trust security framework helps organizations to contain breaches and reduce risks because the network access is segmented, and continuous verification hinders lateral movement to more critical resources. For this reason, adopting a Zero Trust approach can minimize the impact of a cyberattack. A 2021 report by IBM indicates that the average cost of a data breach was $1.76 million less at companies with a mature Zero Trust strategy versus those without one.

Network access control (NAC) is a security technology that controls and manages access to network resources. It helps organizations ensure that only authorized and compliant devices and users can connect to their private networks.

Enterprises can use NAC solutions in various network environments, including wired and wireless networks, remote access, and cloud-based services. They are often used in conjunction with other network security technologies, such as firewalls, intrusion detection systems, and security information and event management (SIEM) solutions.

NAC solutions generally offer the following capabilities:

• Policy enforcement: NAC tools can enforce policies that define what resources a user or device can access once they are authenticated. This helps ensure that authorized users only have access to the resources they need to perform their job functions.
• Endpoint security: NAC can assess the security posture of assets connecting to the network, such as checking for up-to-date antivirus software, patch levels, and operating system versions.
• Guest access: Network access control can provide secure guest access, allowing visitors and bring-your-own-device (BYOD) users to connect to resources without compromising security. Guests can be granted limited access and isolated from the rest of the network to ensure they cannot access sensitive data or resources.
• Compliance: NAC solutions can help organizations comply with regulations and security policies by enforcing access controls and monitoring network activity. Unauthorized or non-compliant devices and users are prevented from accessing the corporate network and reports on device posture can be used for audit purposes.
• Remediation: NAC tools can quarantine or remediate assets that do not meet security policy requirements, such as installing the latest security patches or updating software.
• Network segmentation: NAC can enforce access policies that limit user and device access to specific network parts, such as by creating virtual LANs (VLANs) or network segments. Network segmentation cybersecurity can help prevent the spread of malware or other threats to other parts of the network in the event of a breach.

NAC systems can often be complex to deploy and provide poor visibility into unmanaged assets, specifically medical, Internet of Things (IoT), and operational technology (OT). NAC is also blind to many devices connected through wireless protocols, such as Bluetooth, which are now ubiquitous in enterprise networks. Finally, NAC solutions provide limited risk assessment or threat detection. While the advantages of network segmentation are obvious, threat actors can still compromise these segments and move laterally within a system.

Discover how Armis Centrix™ helps you improve incident response and overcome these limitations of NAC solutionss.

In cybersecurity, macrosegmentation is another way to describe standard network segmentation practices. Network segmentation is the division of an organization’s network into smaller segments that are protected by firewalls. This kind of segmentation is a security best practice recommended by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), the Purdue reference architecture, and other frameworks. The goal is to reduce the potential damage that intruders and malware can cause by preventing free movement and communication between different parts of the network.

For example, an industrial manufacturer will segment its programmable logic controllers (PLCs) so that they don’t communicate with the internet. Properly implemented plant microsegmentationcan prevent intrusions and remote takeover of the PLCs by attackers who gain access to the manufacturer’s IT network via an account takeover attack.

Avoiding or remediating gaps in network segmentation starts with the proper identification of every device in the environment, whether those devices are on traditional IT networks, are in the cloud, or are connected devices like OT, industrial control systems (ICS), and Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) assets that operate outside the standard IT framework. For example, in a health care setting, security may require segmentation of Internet of Things (IoT) devices, connected medical equipment, IT assets, and OT devices like building management controls.

The next step is to assess every device to understand its firmware, software, existing vulnerabilities, risk profile, proper place within the network, and expected behavior. With that information plus continuous device activity monitoring, security teams can see which devices are communicating with segments and which are communicating outside their designated segments — a flag for security risk.

Lateral movement refers to cyberattackers’ techniques to gain access to a network. Once in, lateral movement allows the cybercriminal to move deeper into the compromised system to locate sensitive data and access privileged information.

After gaining access to the system, the cybercriminal impersonates an authorized user and moves throughout the network to achieve their objective. The attacker gathers information across multiple operating systems and accounts, obtains credentials, and gains access to unauthorized areas.

When detecting lateral movement, consider these three main steps:

• Reconnaissance. At the beginning of the breach, the attacker surveys the scene by exploring the network and gathering information on the network’s map and users. After the attacker has identified and determined critical areas to access, they gather the necessary credentials that allow entry.
• Credential/privilege gathering. The next step is credential dumping, the act of stealing credentials to access the network. Common tactics to gain login credentials include phishing attacks or the use of keylogging tools.
• Gaining further access. Once the cyberattacker infiltrates the network, they can perform internal reconnaissance and dive deeper into the system. They will continue navigating the network until they achieve their end goal.

Once an attacker infiltrates a network, it may be hard to pinpoint lateral movement because human attackers can disguise their movement as regular employees to avoid detection. It is vital to locate and remove cybercriminals to mitigate any damage and avoid unnecessary costs.

Enterprise internal networks are used to flat and open; an internal host can access almost all the other hosts on the network. With increasing security control and performance requirements, the modern environment breaks them into small groups or zones based on different business needs or functional criteria and enforces rules to limit access between them. This is called Network Segmentation.

A successful Network Segmentation can significantly improve network performance, reduce cyber-attack risk and protect critical assets. It usually involves switching (Layer 2), routing (Layer 3), and firewall (Layer 4) configuration. Typically it needs to go through 3 steps.

1. Initial Design – Define business requirements, identify device, data, application, user and traffic flow.
2. Implementation and Deployment – divide network into small parts by creating VLANs, assigning different IP subnets, restricting inter-segment access using firewall rules.
3. Ongoing operation, monitoring and maintenance – Ensure it meets all the requirements, and adopt any changes necessary in a prompt fashion, and monitor any abnormal activities.

Network Segmentation could be challenging and complex. Many road blockers are preventing a successful network segmentation rollout. Here are a few typical obstacles people need to overcome in each phase.

1. Network Design

• inaccurate device inventory and fingerprinting, which leads to missing devices and incorrect grouping.
• incomplete application and traffic flow identification, which leads to traffic blocking
• insufficient user behavior analysis and information gathering

2. Implementation and Deployment

• manual work and human mistake can easily cause misconfiguration and network outages, which may interrupt mission critical business operations

3. Ongoing operation, monitoring and maintenance

• constant network changes may introduce human error
• inadvertent monitoring may overlook critical network events or incidents

Armis brings Network Segmentation to a brand new era by greatly simplifying and automating the entire process.

Armis can provide customers with a comprehensive and accurate asset inventory list, including traditional managed devices and unmanaged IoT devices. Each device is identified with detailed information such as make, model, OS, service, the application running, IP connection, traffic flow, user information, etc. This can significantly expedite the design phase.

Leveraging 3rd party tool integration (Network Access Control, firewall, etc.), Armis can automate the change needed to accomplish the network segmentation on the infrastructure, such as switch port configuration, firewall rule, VLAN assignment, etc.

Armis can monitor the environment and alert any anomaly and malicious activities. If such behaviors are detected, Armis will automatically initiate security orchestration workflows enforce or adopt any changes.

Network Segmentation Test is a key component of network segmentation deployment and ongoing regular operation tasks. It typically involves a series of manual or semi-automated security and network checks to ensure that the communication between different network segments works properly as designed. There are no security holes or gaps that attackers could exploit.

The test uses a combination of many different approaches, such as:

• Review of firewall rules
• Review Network architecture diagram and communication workflow
• Network scan from each network segment leveraging pentest tools such as NMAP
• Vulnerability scan for each network segment

This can be conducted by either an internal team member or an external third-party specialist. Usually, hiring an outside professional is the preferred way to go as it is required by many security frameworks such as PCI compliance.

Dividing enterprise internal networks into smaller blocks and firewalling between them exponentially increases the complexity of firewall rules. It is not uncommon to see hundreds or even thousands of firewall rules for a network segmentation project.

Comprehensive testing is essential to ensure that the implementation of a network segmentation project is successful and meets business objectives.

Since network segmentation is a long-term and dynamic process, a periodic test needs to be conducted regularly to ensure that all the control rules are adequately in place and all the segmentations are securely isolated. All the unneeded communication path is completely removed. As a matter of fact, many security frameworks require regular testing, such as quarterly or bi-yearly.

Organizations are having a hard time performing network segmentation tests effectively because of multiple reasons:

• Business requirements are changing all the time
• Test still involves a lot of manual work
• Network environment is getting bigger and more complex
• Connected device count is exploding

Armis Centrix™ discovers and monitors all the devices that comprise the organization. It also records the communication flows both within the network segment or between different segments. The flexible policy engine allows customers to create customized policies to flag or alert any abnormal or malicious traffic activity. Customers can also download ad-hoc reports or generate scheduled regular reports to check if there is any violation of the segmentation rule. This enables customers to perform a comprehensive test constantly and eliminate any security gaps and black holes.

Network segmentation is a cyber hygiene best practice that helps strengthen a business’ security and mitigate damages from a data breach. According to the Cost of Data Breach 2023 report by IBM, the average cost of a data breach has surged nearly 30% to $4.45 million per breach. Meanwhile, companies in the U.S. spend an average of $9.48 million per breach, according to the latest report.

Network segmentation, also called network partitioning or network isolation, divides a network into multiple subnetworks to improve performance and security. Segmentation aids in traffic flow. Creating barriers in a network can help limit or stop traffic flow, reducing the amount of traffic from unauthorized personnel and making it easier for teams to monitor any suspicious activity.

Some network segmentation benefits include:

• Improved performance. Limiting the number of connected devices reduces network traffic. As a result, network congestion results in faster, more efficient performance.
• Stronger security. Monitoring traffic becomes easier for IT managers because subnetworks are only accessible to their appropriate teams. Suspicious activity can be easier to detect since it may break the pattern of routine activity.
• Limited damage. If cyberattackers manage to breach the network, they are faced with more walls of protection. Segmentation prevents lateral movement since the attacker is restricted to the area they have breached.
• Reduced scope of compliance. Segmentation separates data from other systems, which makes it easier to manage compliance. Compliance requirements will only apply to each specific system rather than the entire network.

Best practices to consider when implementing a network segmentation plan include:

• Frequently monitor your network. Monitoring and auditing your network regularly can help you recognize the difference between standard and suspicious activity. The faster you notice a breach, the quicker you can resolve the problem.
• Follow the principle of least privilege (PoLP). The principle of least privilege is a cybersecurity concept that restricts users’ access to only the necessary permissions to perform their duties. PoLP strengthens network security while making it easier to monitor and track traffic.
• Enforce a Zero Trust security model. Zero Trust is a cybersecurity approach that requires users to be authenticated and authorized at every stage of digital interaction. Requiring verification at every level reduces the chances of outside parties entering a network.
• Restrict third-party access. Limit the number of third-party visitors accessing your network.

Microsegmentation in cybersecurity creates small zones within or adjacent to existing network segments to make it harder for malicious communications and activity to move throughout the network. By preventing lateral movement within zones protected by a firewall, network microsegmentation can limit the impact of external attacks, malware infections, and unauthorized internal user access. To be effective, microsegmentation requires visibility of all devices and communication in the environment.

Network segmentation is a layer of physical security that cordons off a network from other networks, separating an OT network from an IT network, a guest network from a corporate network, or one critical manufacturing network from another.

A common segmentation practice is often found within critical infrastructures such as oil and gas, power, utilities, aerospace, transportation, manufacturing, and other critical verticals identified by the US government. Why? Because the escalating attack frequencies and levels of expertise required to gain access to ICS devices and the machines used to monitor and manage them warrants heightened attention.

Although network segmentation of OT and ICS networks is a good practice, it is both costly and complicated. Costly in that it may require considerable time and potential downtime, and complicated in that advanced expertise is required to achieve functional and successful segmentation properly.

But regardless of an organization’s ability to achieve proper segmentation or not, there are ways to safeguard even the simplest of devices, or components, hidden down in the depths of what is known as The Purdue Model, all the way up through the ICS network, or systems, to the machines that monitor their health.

Speaking of systems and components, having visibility into the lowest levels of activities and communications to and from these components throughout the systems solves many potential problems in properly segmented networks and those that are not. Managing to the lowest level of activity can help alleviate malicious intent against components – often found in improperly segmented networks. Still, it can also help to spotlight human error in properly segmented networks.

When a system is down, production halts, safety is in jeopardy, and money is lost. At the end of the day, misconfigured components in a segmented network can be as costly as an infected SCADA server. Monitoring to the lowest levels of activities as commands pass through the system to the components can be an effective way to reduce both scenarios.

The overall drive to converge IT networks with OT networks is the valuable insights extracted to improve safety, uptime, maintenance, regulatory and compliance, analytics, and performance. Together, these components help to drive a business’s competitive position in its marketplace. If this sounds a lot like Industry 4.0, you would not be wrong.

As defined, Industry 4.0 is akin to the Fourth Industrial Revolution, where traditional industrial and manufacturing practices are being upgraded to include smart processes being completed by smarter devices. These devices are emboldened to make process decisions that allow for improved metrics such as:

• Manufacturing processes

• Improved uptime

• Timely maintenance

• Data-driven analytics, and ultimately,

• Competitive business positioning

But more importantly, this convergence allows for big data to be shared across the entire enterprise where it can be used to streamline an entire supply chain, improve workers safety and reduce accidents on the manufacturing floor, and allow for traditionally IT-based ERP, CRM, and other IT platform to lend value to what was once a segmented portion of the enterprise.

Imagine a manufacturing line autonomously deciding to notify an SAP platform that it is running low on plastics it uses to blow bottles two weeks in advance. Sounds simple? It’s not. The checks and balances needed, the securing of the data and the connections made, and the trust in allowing machine-to-machine decision-making are substantial, which is why IT-OT convergence and Industry 4.0 are tackled as a cross-functional task involving many stakeholders to get it right.

Simply put, metadata is data about data. It describes and provides information about other data.

In the context of “Discovering asset metadata of OT devices,” we are talking about metadata within operational devices that reside on SCADA networks, DCS networks, or OT networks as a whole. Take for example an Allen-Bradley PLC. Metadata about this type of device may simply be its make, model, and its manufacturer. A step deeper, and we may find metadata about its IP and MAC address, its OS and build numbers, as well as data around potential software flaws.

A step even deeper may reveal:

1. Connections these devices are making to peer devices
2. Ports and protocols in use
3. Services being leveraged to make these connections
4. Activities and commands used to control and configure these devices

Put into practice, properly tracking and reporting on metadata about a controller and its fans’ revolution speed may reveal an anomaly that would have left a critical system in jeopardy. The metadata in this instance is the hidden detail found when examining actual revolutions per second, and their deviations from normal. What may not be visible to the naked eye is clearly apparent when examining the metadata.

Vulnerability scanning is a process whereby computing endpoints of interest are virtually probed for vulnerabilities, security weaknesses, and security gaps. Scanning is a methodology built to probe for weakness, whether known CVE’s, system flaws, open ports, or misconfigurations.

Although commonly found within the IT side of the house, scanning for weaknesses on the IoT and OT side has long been debated, with endless stories of frozen sensors, stalled elevators, and locked doors. When originally constructed, these ‘non-IT’ devices were not built to accept scanning. As a whole, sensors, controllers, meters, and the like often arrive underpowered, with little memory and a specific static function in mind. Scan for open ports on a motion sensor, and you might get a locked door or a frozen elevator. Scan for an OS build on a PLC, and you might get a tripped controller.

We have all heard these horror stories of active scanning on non-IT-based devices. But what if our system inherently knew of the pedigree of the device and software on the other end of the IP address? Wouldn’t it be nice to intelligently discover not based on IP address but on the abilities of a device to accept and respond properly? Knowing the difference between a SCADA server running Windows 7, an HMI running Windows CE6.0, an engineering Workstation running Windows 10, and a PLC running VxWorks, all rife with their own vulnerabilities, would be a valuable set of information when deciding to bring OT and ICS devices into the fold of active scanning.

To reiterate, scanning an OT network is something to stay away from, however there are methods that will enable organizations to gain information from assets that are dormant or do not communicate over the network.

Active querying in OT (Operational Technology) environments involves the use of specialized technology to interact with and retrieve information directly from industrial devices, such as Programmable Logic Controllers (PLCs), Remote Terminal Units (RTUs), and other components. Unlike passive monitoring, which observes network traffic, active querying initiates communication with devices in their native language to gather specific information.

Armis Smart Active Querying starts with the identification of target devices, IP ranges, VLANs etc. within the OT network. This can involve discovering devices based on known protocols, IP addresses, or other device characteristics. Active querying is conducted using the native industrial device communication protocols. This ensures compatibility and minimizes the risk of disruption. The queries are formulated in the specific device’s native device language, and emulates the queries made by an Human Machine Interface (HMI) to the device. The queries retrieve specific device information, including details such as device type, firmware version, configuration settings, logged-in users, and other relevant metadata. Security including encryption and authentication protects the process and the data being retrieved.

To ensure the safety and stability of the queried devices, active querying is typically read-only. Active querying is often performed during periods of low network utilization to minimize any potential impact on operational processes. Optimally timing polling intervals helps ensure that the querying process does not interfere with the real-time demands of industrial systems.Armis Smart Active Querying solutions empowers administrators with customization options, allowing organizations to define query frequencies, policies, and specific IP ranges. This flexibility ensures that the active querying process aligns with the unique requirements of each specific OT environment.

Let your discovery tool go to work to identify and scan those devices that fall into the bucket of desirable devices to scan.

Lastly, review for the outcome. Did your discovery tool accurately identify all assets? Did your policy run as intended? Did any devices respond to a probing scan unexpectedly?

A best practice would be to repeat step 3 under varying degrees of load on the devices in question. Just because a device responded well to a scan while idle does not mean it will respond similarly under load.

As cyber-physical systems collect operational data and integrate all elements of a supply chain, the manufacturing attack surface expands, increasing opportunities for bad actors to infiltrate your network.

Here are five critical security issues in the manufacturing industry:

Ransomware attacks

Ransomware attacks seek to extort money from victims by encrypting files and requesting a ransom for the decryption key. With heavy reliance on operational technology (OT) and Internet of Things (IoT) devices, manufacturing companies are prime targets for ransomware attacks.

Equipment sabotage

In addition to the compromise on devices with malware, damage to factory equipment used for production causes operational disruption and downtime. To minimize the possibility of equipment sabotage, companies should educate employees and partners on facility and data security best practices.

Cyberwarfare

Most often for political and economic reasons, criminals working on behalf of a government or an independent actor carry out sophisticated cyberattacks targeting critical infrastructure or other manufacturing assets. To protect against nation-state attacks, manufacturing companies should invest in real-time asset monitoring, security awareness, and incident response planning.

Learn more about this threat by reading our State of Cyberwarfare Report.

Internal breaches

Attackers exploit vulnerabilities within a manufacturer by leveraging phishing emails and malicious software insertion. Also, bad actors within the organization may provide cybercriminals with unauthorized access to systems, credentials, and tools. Manufacturing organizations should implement security principles such as network segmentation, zero trust, and least privilege in order to minimize the risk of internal threats.

Supply chain attacks

In a supply chain attack, threat actors target their victim’s business partners and suppliers, compromise the systems of third parties, and acquire assets to launch cyberattacks. After gaining access to a manufacturer through a vendor, attackers can steal data, plant malware, and disrupt operations.

SOAR stands for Security Orchestration, Automation, and Response. Each of those categorical functions in a SOAR tool combine to help streamline security operations and accelerate responses to threats, strengthening cybersecurity across the entire organization.

Air gapping an OT network is conceptually isolating a device or group of devices from external connectivity. External connectivity can be that of any device or network not defined by the air-gapped network. Although air gapping is a good concept in principle, it can often lead to unintended consequences as it can bring a false sense of security with it.

One will nary find a detractor to air gapping the most critical of infrastructure, including government networks, our nation’s electrical grid, and other critical infrastructure networks from the Internet. But do air gapping networks from other internal networks provide a false sense of security?

It can be argued that simply defaulting to air gapping a network is a leading contributing factor to ICS intrusions as ICS security evolution is lagging, has led to stagnation, a lack of innovation, and a false sense of security.

Let us consider for a second the findings from the Repository of Industrial Security Incidents (RISI): The majority of ICS incidents occur from within the ICS network. But how could this be with a properly constructed air-gapped network? RISI found that removable devices, laptops, diagnostic equipment, and the like have all contributed to critical incidents under the guise of a secure air-gapped network.

Added to these pressures is Industry 4.0, where smart communicating devices are found throughout the OT and IoT networks, offering data to enrich enterprise platforms that allow plants to be more efficient, economical, and productive. Air-gapped networks, by nature, can not participate in offering insightful data into a converged network.

What is left of an isolated, hidden network left to its own ‘devices’? It becomes stagnant and antiquated. It gets left behind with a security posture from a time gone by. It is, in fact, less secure over time. As opposed to passing a false sense of security on to the next Operations Manager in line, a better understanding of how to secure those systems may be a better idea than isolating them.

MITRE ATT&CK (Adversarial Tactics, Techniques, and Common Knowledge) is a knowledge base that is used to describe the actions and behaviors of cyber adversaries. It provides a comprehensive and detailed mapping of the various tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) that adversaries may employ during different stages of the cyber attack lifecycle.

ATT&CK is organized into matrices, with each matrix focusing on a specific platform or environment, such as enterprise, mobile, and cloud. The matrices are further divided into columns representing tactics and rows representing techniques. Tactics describe the high-level objectives of an attacker, while techniques provide more granular details about how those objectives are achieved.

Security professionals and organizations use MITRE ATT&CK to enhance their understanding of potential threats and to improve their detection, defense, and response capabilities. By aligning security measures with the tactics and techniques outlined in ATT&CK, defenders can better prepare for and respond to cyber threats. It serves as a valuable resource for developing and testing security tools, as well as for sharing threat intelligence across the cybersecurity community.

Made up of 11 Tactics and over 80 different techniques used within those tactics, the MITRE ATT&CK for ICS Framework looks to normalize the discussion and allow concerted efforts to protect our ICS networks.

Visit our dedicated post about MITRE ATT&CK techniques for ICS to look closer at the actual tactics and procedures (TPP).

Here you will see a detailed listing of the various vectors and methods used to infiltrate our ICS networks. What is particularly of interest within the MITRE ATT&CK for ICS framework is the breadth of the techniques. Spanning from supply chain attacks outside the ICS enterprise to man-in-the-middle attacks to control parameter changes in PLCs, the Framework is a comprehensive approach that should be top of mind when speaking with ICS stakeholders.

Outside of asking security platform vendors if they have incorporated the MITRE ATT&CK for ICS Framework into their solution, there are actions that your team can take within our ICS organization to ensure the most detrimental of threats is accounted for.

These include some of the following activities:

• Adversary Emulation
• Behavioral Analytics
• Cyber Threat Intelligence Enrichment
• Defensive Gap Assessment
• Red Teaming
• SOC Maturity Assessment
• Failure Scenario Development
• Cross-Domain Adversary Tracking
• Educational Resource

Such a framework is best addressed with cross-functional teams from IT, OT, Security, and Network as securing ICS is not a job to be done in a silo. Identifying scenarios and their pending outcomes based on severity is a great place to start. Gap analysis to identify all the ‘what-ifs’ based upon worst-case scenarios will certainly be eye-opening, but that is the intent of the framework – to begin a conversation with cross-functional stakeholders, with the common goal of protecting the jewels of the organization.

Also known as a building automation system, building control, or building management and control system, a building management system is a digital interface that monitors and manages building operations to ensure safety and smooth operations.

A BMS can manage electrical and mechanical services, including supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) systems, programmable logic controllers (PLCs), field devices, heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC), access control, energy consumption, and critical sensors.

When selecting a BMS cybersecurity solution, teams should consider web compatibility, monitoring and reporting capabilities, ease of incorporating new systems or sensors, legacy technology compatibility, and reliability to ensure building management system cybersecurity.

Unlike separate control systems with different operating technologies, a BMS offers flexibility, feedback, and centralized control.

Here are the top benefits of BMS:

• Tuning maintenance. Unlike buildings using stand-alone controls that may deviate from their optimized settings, BMS can flag excessive energy use and maintain HVAC tuning, for example.
• Time savings. With automation, facility managers can save time adjusting settings and monitoring data.
• Maintenance cost reduction. A BMS can identify equipment failure early on and alert operators to initiate preventive maintenance, saving costs.
• Predictive capabilities. A BMS can anticipate high loads and avoid maximum thresholds for electrical and mechanical services with appropriate adjustments.
• Building information modeling (BIM) integration. Refining and simulating a proposed design can be done efficiently with a BMS integration. Integrating a BMS with a BIM tool allows a proposed design to be simulated and refined prior to construction.

Like any digital asset, BMS devices may have cyber and physical vulnerabilities due to management, automation, field device operation, and communication shortfalls.

Here’s what contributes to BMS vulnerabilities:

• Aging technology. Many building systems comprise legacy technology with default credentials that are easy to guess and susceptible to simple attacks. Open ports that can’t be blocked without retrofit or major upgrades and technology that can’t be changed or patched are some common features of aging technology. Close monitoring, fine-tuning, and updating legacy BMS devices are all critical to mitigating cyber risks.
• Physical security gaps. Unlocked PLCs and open control cabinets are examples of security deficiencies that lead to BMS vulnerabilities. Facility managers must ensure that controllers, workstations, and BMS field devices comply with operational technology (OT) security best practices.

Building management system vulnerabilities enable attackers to inject malware or sabotage devices, which can be used to access other critical parts of your network and cause operational disruption and unplanned downtime. Armis empowers teams with full visibility into BMS and contextual insights into other assets in your environment to minimize those cybersecurity risks.

Success is no longer measured by prevention alone. The new gold standard KPI is MTCR (Mean Time to Clean Recovery). In 2026, maturity is defined by how quickly you can rebuild your entire stack in a “Clean Room” environment from Immutable Backups (backups that cannot be deleted or changed even by an admin).

Learn about Continuous Threat Exposure Management (CTEM)

• 0–15 mins: Isolate “Patient Zero” from the network but do not power it off (this preserves evidence in the RAM).
• 15–30 mins: Disable all cloud-syncing (OneDrive/Google Drive) to prevent encrypted files from overwriting clean cloud versions.
• 30–60 mins: Sever all VPN and external trust relationships and immediately reset all Domain Admin credentials.

Explore the Early Warning Threat Intelligence Platform

The landscape is dominated by:

• Akira: Specializing in high-uptime targets like Energy and Healthcare.
• Qilin: Scaling like a tech startup, using “professional” extortion interfaces that include regulatory fine calculators to pressure victims.
• DragonForce: A decentralized cartel focusing almost exclusively on high-speed data theft without encryption.

Read More About Ransomware Groups

The “Castle and Moat” model is dead. Zero Trust operates on “Never Trust, Always Verify.” By implementing Micro-segmentation, you ensure that if an attacker compromises one AI-driven sensor or a laptop, they are trapped in that “zone” and cannot jump to your critical financial servers or backup domains.

Read the Zero Trust White Paper

Manufacturing is now the #1 global target. Because factory floors have a “zero tolerance for downtime,” attackers focus on IT/OT convergence. Ransomware now “lives off the land,” moving from an office email to the shop floor to shut down production lines, manipulate safety systems, or corrupt quality control data.

Get the IT/OT Convergence White Paper

Yes. A major 2026 trend involves “Gig-Worker Exploitation.” When remote access is blocked, attackers use gig-economy platforms to hire unsuspecting local freelancers or delivery drivers for “simple tasks”, like plugging in a router or picking up a discarded laptop, unknowingly planting a hardware backdoor inside the building.

Visit the Armis Trust Center

This is the most significant criminal merger of 2026, a collective formed by Scattered Spider, ShinyHunters, and LAPSUS$. They are masters of “SaaS-to-SaaS” attacks, bypassing the network perimeter entirely to move from your corporate Slack or Teams channels into your AWS or Salesforce environments using stolen API tokens.

Download our Threat Intelligence Overview

We have entered the era of Agentic AI, autonomous hacking agents, that “think” their way through your network. Unlike static scripts, these AI agents can mutate their own code to bypass your specific security tools, conduct 24/7 autonomous reconnaissance, and use 3-second voice clones (Deepfakes) to trick employees into providing access.

Explore Early Warning Threat Intelligence

Nearly 50% of attacks in 2026 no longer bother with file encryption. Attackers simply steal the data and threaten a public leak. By skipping the “locker” phase, they avoid triggering most anti-ransomware software that monitors for high-speed file changes, allowing them to remain undetected in your network for weeks.

Read our 2026 Cyber Predictions Report

In 2026, 93% of ransomware attacks involve data theft before encryption. In a “Double Extortion” scenario, attackers lock your systems and steal sensitive data. Even if you restore from backups, they threaten to leak that data publicly or sell it to competitors. This forces a crisis of compliance (GDPR/NIS2 fines) and brand trust that backups cannot solve.

Learn how to prevent data exfiltration with Armis Centrix™

Ransomware attacks have been a lucrative business model for criminals, with large payouts.
According to the 2023 Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report, the median cost per ransomware more than doubled over the past two years to $26,000, with 95% of incidents that experienced a loss costing between $1 and $2.25 million.

Ransomware is a malware program that encrypts files on computer systems, making them unusable. Attackers typically threaten to either permanently lock down compromised systems or to release sensitive data, if a ransom is not paid.

• An increased attack surface, lack of security awareness, and poor cyber hygiene make many organizations an easy target.
• Improved encryption and the popularity of untraceable cryptocurrencies facilitate the execution of ransomware.
• Ransomware gangs often operate as organized crime, targeting certain countries or sectors.
• Ransomware-as-a-service (RaaS) models also help to propagate this type of attack.

The U.S. government considers ransomware a growing national security threat and has launched a series of initiatives to combat ransomware attacks, including the StopRansomware.gov website which provides education about how to prevent and mitigate ransomware attacks.

According to Gartner, “The percentage of nation-states passing legislation to regulate ransomware payments, fines, and negotiations will rise to 30 percent by the end of 2025, compared to less than one percent in 2021.” In the U.S., government organizations such as the FBI and  the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) advise victims to report the incidents to law enforcement and not pay ransoms. Still there were significant ransomware incidents impacting hundreds of organizations in 2023 including:

• The City Of Dallas
• Johnson Controls
• Sony
• Las Vegas MGM Resorts

High-profile cases make the headlines, but cyberattacks on small businesses account for about 75% of all ransomware incidents, according to the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ).

By 2031, ransomware costs will reach $265 billion annually. But the financial damage of ransomware are only part of the picture; it can also cause reputational and operational damage, including:

• Downtime and operational disruption
• Legal settlements and high insurance costs
• Loss of trust from investors, clients, and employees

No organization is immune to cyberattacks, but every organization can take steps to strengthen their defenses to minimize the risks, including:

• Get complete visibility into your environment through comprehensive asset discovery and inventory.
• Continuously monitor traffic on your network to detect any anomalies in asset or user behavior.
• Implement Zero Trust policies and network segmentation.
• Automate policy enforcement to secure your data and halt attacks.
• Promote cybersecurity best practices such as multifactor authentication and patch management.
• Have a plan in place for quick response in case of a ransomware attack.

According to the FBI, Ransomware is a type of malicious software, or malware, that prevents you from accessing your computer files, systems, or networks and demands you pay a ransom for their return. This is accomplished by encrypting all of the files on networked computers and forcing businesses to pay a ransom for the decryption key.

There are many methods that attackers use to get ransomware onto a corporate network. These include (spear) phishing with malicious attachments or links to fraudulent websites, social media posts, fake versions of legitimate software (often offered as Warez) of otherwise paid products, drive-by downloads, or even low tech methods like leaving an infected thumb drive in a place that an unsuspecting user will find it and plug it into their computer, purely out of curiosity.

What happens then?

Once the malware has found its way onto the network, it then moves laterally through the network by exploiting known weaknesses on network endpoints. These can include unpatched vulnerabilities and insecure configurations like default/weak passwords, privilege escalation, and services like RPC, RDP, and SMBv1.

As neighboring devices are discovered, the malicious code is spread throughout the network without any need for human involvement. More advanced variants (like Ryuk) will do things like discovering all neighbors via local ARP table, send a Wake-on-LAN packet to these machines to bring them out of sleep/hibernation, infect them, and then delete the Windows VSS (local backup) so that, once encrypted, the drive cannot be recovered.

The old adage of “Defense in Depth” holds true regarding ransomware. The following measures are recommended as part of a comprehensive security strategy.

1. User Training: This is the first line of defense in any corporate security strategy. Teach users how to avoid threats, and to report them as soon as they notice anything suspicious.
2. Principle of Least Privilege: Always employ the principle of least privilege for users within the network. Restricted-rights accounts can not only limit the ability for malware to compromise the host computer, it can also limit its lateral spread.
3. Patching: Ransomware, like all malware, takes advantage of weaknesses or bugs in software that can be exploited. One of the simplest, and most effective ways to protect endpoints is to make sure they are up to date on their OS, as well as all installed applications.
4. EPP/EDR: Invest in a quality next-gen AV platform with behavioral monitoring and response capabilities. Should ransomware find its way onto a corporate endpoint, this software can often detect and stop the threat.
5. Shore Up Your Configuration: Ensure that all systems are using the strongest security options available. Use SMBv2 instead of SMBv1, SSH instead of Telnet. Ensure that passwords aren’t being transmitted in clear text. Ensure that critical data like SS#, Credit Card Numbers, and patient records are encrypted.
6. Discover the Gaps: Patching, EPP/EDR, and Configuration are only successful if they are fully implemented. Auditing the environment is critical for finding gaps. What endpoints don’t have EPP/EDR installed (or the agent is out of date)? What endpoints have unsupported OS’s or unpatched vulnerabilities? Which endpoints are running vulnerable services?
7. Network Monitoring and Response: All of the previous recommendations have been geared towards preventing malware from getting a foothold in the environment. However, should an attack occur, detecting and containing the spread of malware is time critical. Network traffic should be continuously monitored for anomalies and malicious behaviors. Dynamic response actions should be configured to lock down dangerous devices without the delay imposed by human intervention.
8. Network Segmentation:  Network segmentation can drastically slow down the spread of malware by restricting device access between different security zones. At a basic level, this can be done with VLANs using Access Control Lists. Or more advanced filtering can be employed by using a Next-Gen Firewall with Deep Packet Inspection.

Extended Detection and Response (XDR) is a security solution capable of unifying several threat defense tools into a holistic approach.

In its Market Guide for Extended Detection and Response, Gartner defines XDR as “a platform that integrates, correlates and contextualizes data and alerts from multiple security prevention, detection and response components.”

While Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) security focuses on threats on endpoint devices, XDR solutions take a more comprehensive approach beyond endpoint protection.

Here are some of the technologies that XDR security can integrate:

• Endpoints
• Servers and clouds
• Networks and firewall
• Email and apps

XDR platforms enable advanced threat detection and response because they:

• Centralize risk management with more accurate detections, increasing defenses against vulnerabilities and unauthorized access.
• Boost the productivity of the security team, enabling faster workflows through integrated alerts and unified incident response.
• Minimize the challenges of integrating different technologies, contributing to product consolidation and maximized return on investment (ROI) on technology spending.

The XDR market is expanding, with growing adoption among smaller organizations. Gartner predicts that 40 percent of enterprises will use XDR tools by 2027 to help streamline security tooling and processes.

According to an IBM report, the global average cost of a data breach in 2023 was USD 4.45 million, a 15% increase over 3 years.

Total asset visibility and intelligence creates the foundation for stronger cyberattack protection.

Device identification

More than a third of devices in the typical organization’s environment are unmanaged, so traditional security tools can’t see them, much less provide important insights about them. In that visibility gap, devices can be compromised, and their connections exploited without raising alarms. That’s why a solution that can see unmanaged devices and provide deep levels of contextual intelligence is important.

Asset location

Understanding where every device sits in the environment is another key cybersecurity need. Network segmentation limits intruders’ access to critical systems and databases to prevent data exfiltration, ransomware attacks, and remote hijacking of operational technology (OT), industrial control systems (ICS), and other devices.

Device behavior

When organizations can identify and locate every asset, they can monitor their behaviors and compare them against known good behavior. This process requires a large, continuously updated knowledgebase of device data to provide rich behavior insights based on usage context.

Risk assessment and threat detection

Continuously comparing device attributes to known standards can reveal firmware and software that needs patches or updates for security. And continuously comparing device behavior to known standards quickly identifies anomalies that can signal threats. For example,  communication with an unknown device or a transfer of a larger than normal amount of data.

Threat response

When a vulnerability or a threat appears, an effective security solution will alert the security team and automatically enforce any policies that the team has set up. For example, the solution can isolate a device that’s exhibiting suspicious activity from the rest of its network or completely disconnect it.

Cybersecurity compliance

Accurate device inventories and activity records are key resources for demonstrating compliance with data protection and operational security regulations. An effective solution for cyberattack prevention will provide this information and continuously update it to provide both a real-time snapshot of devices a with details about their behavior over time. These records are useful for forensic investigations in the event of an incident, and for team review after testing.

Device visibility and insights for cyberattack protection

Armis Centrix™ can help protect your organization against unacceptable risk and cyber attacks by seeing, protecting and managing every device in the organization’s environment. Armis Asset Intelligence Engine is the world’s largest, with real-time data on billions of devices that provides up-to-date insights on firmware, software, and behavior to protect organizations from cyberattacks.

SOC stands for security operations center. SOC is a team or facility dealing with security issues within an organization. The goal is to detect, assess, and respond to security threats, increasing the organization’s resilience and helping to meet regulatory requirements.

There are different models for a SOC strategy, from in-house operations to outsourced resources. Large companies might have a dedicated facility where the SOC team supervises the site and controls access, alarms, vehicle barriers, and video surveillance. Other organizations might have only a team with specific security roles. Not all organizations have a 24/7 SOC because it requires specialized staffing and significant investments.

In cybersecurity, SOC focuses on protecting digital assets from cyber threats to prevent data breaches and business disruptions. Some of the specific functions include:

• Monitoring systems, networks, devices, databases, internet traffic, and users.
• Detecting cyber incidents and responding to issues as they arise.
• Investigating and validating reported threats to discard false positives.
• Implementing security measures and best practices, such as patch management.

SOC benefits in cybersecurity include:

• More control over the organization’s digital assets, contributing to better compliance.
• Improved risk management with real-time threat detection and response.

A successful SOC implementation has people, processes, and technology as its pillars. You’ll need to:

• Develop a cybersecurity strategy — a critical step is securing leadership buy-in for identified projects.
• Hire security professionals with the skill set required for technical and leadership roles and responsibilities. You’ll need a team of engineers and analysts to analyze data, track down threats, handle, or escalate incidents.
• Determine which technology to use to shield your organization from cyber threats. Your tech stack might include asset management software, security monitoring tools, threat detection solutions, and incident management platforms.
• Establish the processes and procedures on how an incident is detected, investigated, escalated, and remediated.
• Ensure your organization has an incident response and disaster recovery plan in place.

In cybersecurity, an effective SOC requires continuous monitoring of your network and digital assets. To detect vulnerabilities and threats, organizations need security tools capable of unified asset discovery and ongoing behavioral analysis of every type of device in your environment.

The cyberattack lifecycle, also known as the cyber kill chain, is a model that describes the stages of a typical cyberattack. The model was originally developed by Lockheed Martin and has since been widely adopted by the cybersecurity industry.

By understanding the stages of the cyberattack lifecycle, organizations can develop strategies and defenses to prevent, detect, and respond to breaches. They can also develop incident response plans and procedures to minimize the impact of an attack and recover from it as quickly as possible.

The stages of a cyberattack lifecycle include:

1. Reconnaissance: In the initial stage, the attacker gathers information about the target, such as IP addresses, domain names, and email addresses. This information is typically gathered through techniques such as social engineering, phishing, or scanning.
2. Weaponization: The attacker creates or acquires a tool or exploit that can be used to compromise the target. This might include a malware payload or an exploit that takes advantage of a software vulnerability.
3. Delivery: The attacker delivers the weaponized payload to the target, typically through an email attachment, a website, or a network exploit.
4. Exploitation: The weaponized payload is executed on the target system, allowing the attacker to gain access to the system and begin to carry out their objectives.
5. Installation: The attacker installs additional tools or malware that allow them to maintain access and control over the system.
6. Command and control: In this phase, the attacker establishes a command and control channel that allows them to communicate with the compromised system and issue commands or exfiltrate data.
7. Actions on objectives: In this final stage, the attacker carries out their objectives, which may include stealing sensitive data, disrupting services, or other malicious activities.

Learn more about the Armis approach to threat detection that covers all stages for managed and unmanaged devices.

The cyberattack lifecycle has multiple stages, and stopping an intrusion at any one of them can prevent a bad actor from carrying out their ransomware or data theft plans. Here’s what you need:

• Prevention: The best way to break the attack lifecycle is to prevent it from happening in the first place. This involves implementing security controls, such as firewalls, intrusion detection systems, and antivirus software, to prevent attackers from gaining access to the network. Network segmentation can also effectively limit lateral movement and mitigate damage in the event of a breach.
• Threat detection: Even with preventative measures in place, it’s still possible for attackers to breach a network. Threat detection methods, such as security analytics and a contextual device knowledgebase, can help identify and respond to attacks before they can cause significant damage.
• Continuous monitoring: Ongoing monitoring of network and device activity, such as through Armis Centrix™, can help to quickly detect and respond to any suspicious or anomalous behavior and threats.
• User awareness and education: Many attacks rely on social engineering techniques to trick users into giving up sensitive information or installing malware. Educating users on the risks of spear phishing and other social engineering techniques can help to reduce the likelihood of these attacks succeeding and improve organizational cyber hygiene.

Attackers often seek to insert their own code into target apps, systems, and devices to change how a program runs, gain unauthorized access to data and systems, or control a network, system, or device remotely. SQL injection, cross-site scripting, and remote file injection are some common code injection attacks.

Anything that runs on code and isn’t properly secured can be vulnerable to code injection attacks. Different strains of code injection attacks can impact apps and websites, databases, networks, and connected devices of all kinds, including wireless video cameras, display screens, medical diagnostic equipment, printers, phones, and even ethernet cables.

A code injection vulnerability can allow attackers to corrupt or steal data, deface websites and apps, and launch ransomware attacks. Injection of worms, viruses, and other malware designed to propagate can cause a code injection attack to spread well beyond the initial entry point. Code injection vulnerabilities can also allow privilege escalation, leading to the remote takeover of devices, apps, websites, and networks.

Code injection attacks rely on introducing new or ambiguous code into an application.

Code injection prevention focuses primarily on limiting the amount and quality of code that can be introduced. Preventive steps include:

• Limiting users’ ability to inject code.
• Actively looking for and remediating known vulnerabilities.
• Monitoring device behavior to detect code injection attacks in real time.

A security solution that continuously assesses an organization’s devices can identify known vulnerabilities in device operating systems and software in real time. That enables the cybersecurity team to remediate those vulnerabilities manually or create policies to automatically install the necessary updates.

Because code injection attacks only need one entry point to potentially affect an entire app, website, network, or organization, prevention begins with the identification of every device on the organization’s networks and in their airspace. Armis Centrix™ can identify every device, including unmanaged medical, IIoT, OT, and ICS devices, and managed assets, portable devices, and cloud instances.

As Armis identifies each device, it compares that device to unique device data held in the Armis Asset Intelligence Engine. This always-growing collection of data on billions of devices helps the platform analyze each discovered asset to identify vulnerable firmware and software, install patches and updates, raise alerts, and enforce policies when the platform detects a threat in real time. Get a demo to learn more.

The beating heart of almost everyone’s cyber operation is the Security Operation Centre and its analysts. Whether you have outsourced some or all of the layers in a SOC, three things remain consistent.

1. you can’t outsource the risk.
2. you have too many alerts and not enough people.
3. measurement and metrics are highly visible.

Making the SOC effective is the single most important function in detection and protection controls. The Security Operation Center needs to be greater than the sum of its parts, or it will drown under the weight of data. To help analysts decide what data is interesting and not, enrichment tools have been created to help that triage process.

One methodology to help an analyst build or follow hypotheses around interesting events is the Diamond model for intrusion analysis. The Diamond Model has four sides, Adversary, Capability, Victim, and Infrastructure.

The stream of data coming into the Security Operation Center can be applied to each of the sides of the diamond to see if any patterns have a security context. This process has largely become the dominion of Threat Intelligence. Being able to boost the volume, accuracy, and speed at which alerts are triaged in the SOC is always one of the key metrics, if not the only metric.

SOC acumen, the ability to make good decisions, faster is the core to SOC effectiveness. We can build a measure of SOC acumen around the diamond model. Each side of the diamond model has the ability to give the analyst access to a “playbook” a playbook is an essential tool for the analyst as a prescribed set of actions to follow to determine the nature of an alert. Selecting the right playbook is critical to ensure an alert can be triaged correctly and quickly. 

When we look at the maturity organizations have in playbooks from a diamond model perspective, we can see that the nature of the Threat intelligence industry has driven a bias towards some of the sides of the diamond. This bias can be attributed to the “indicator of something” industry largely focusing on adversarial or capability-based indicators.

This bias forces the SOC analysts down a path with a limited set of playbooks, which often are not the most efficient playbooks to resolve an alert. If the analyst had access to a balanced portfolio of playbooks with equal victim and infrastructure data, it would give the analyst a clearer picture of the alert and allow the analyst to choose an entirely different and the most appropriate playbook, increasing the SOC acumen.

This bias has been recognized in a recently commissioned Ponemon report into SOC effectiveness as the single biggest issue. The number one answer to the question. What can make the SOC ineffective?. There was a lack of visibility into the attack surface. The attack surface directly relates to the infrastructure side of the diamond model, and the number one answer to the question, “What is the main barrier to successfully operating a Security Operations Center?”

Was a lack of visibility into the IT security infrastructure. Again highlighting a deficiency in the infrastructure side of the diamond model as the primary cause of the SOC being ineffective. Building a world-class SOC requires a balanced capability across all sides of the diamond model, enabling the analyst to select the most efficient playbook to optimize the triage process’s time and certainty.

Cybersecurity is the group of best practices that keeps intruders out of business networks, healthcare systems, industrial control networks, critical infrastructure, and other systems. It prevents the exposure of sensitive data to criminals and state actors, stops ransomware attacks that can disrupt an organization’s daily operations, and prevents remote takeovers of computers, equipment, and other assets.

Cybersecurity also ensures that organizations comply with regulations that govern data use and protection in various industries. Cybersecurity helps protect businesses from financial losses, the erosion of trust that can occur after a cyberattack, and the prospect of uninsurability because of poor security practices or successful attacks.

Effective cybersecurity requires that an organization identifies every connected device in an organization, enabling security leaders to know exactly what they need to protect.

Here are the key steps to eliminate gaps in your cybersecurity posture.

Risk assessment

To set cybersecurity priorities, security teams need to know which devices are at risk of attacks, as well as the identity, potential severity, and likelihood of those attacks. Risk assessment is increasingly crucial for operational technology and industrial control system (OT/ICS) devices that used to be protected by air gaps between OT and IT networks. Increasingly, OT and IT environments are converging as many OT and ICS devices are now connected to the internet, resulting in an expanded attack surface.

Compliance

Cybersecurity is a key factor in compliance with data security regulations, including HIPAA in health care, PCI-DSS in payments, and other compliance guidelines such as the NIST Cyber Security Framework and the CIS Critical Security Controls. Compliance requires asset inventories, device security, and encryption of data, all of which a good cybersecurity platform can help provide and enforce.

Network segmentation

Cybersecurity also requires proper segmentation of assets to limit access to sensitive assets, data, and processes. Successful segmentation requires complete visibility of all devices, including those that traditional network scans can miss or interfere with, such as Internet of Things (IoT) devices, OT and ICS devices, and connected medical equipment. In addition to mapping networks and their segments, an effective cybersecurity solution will monitor device activity within and across networks to look for potential threats based on device behavior.

Threat detection and response

Passive monitoring of all the devices in an organization’s environment — on the networks and in the airspace — enables real-time threat detection, which is a critical cybersecurity capability. By comparing real-time device activity and the state of device firmware and software, an effective threat detection system can see anomalous behavior as soon as it happens, alert the security team, and automatically enforce established policies.

Total device visibility and security

Armis Centrix™ makes every asset and connection visible, so organizations have the complete device inventory required for a comprehensive cybersecurity practice. Armis provides robust, scalable cybersecurity support across complex environments with comprehensive device monitoring, vulnerability assessments, and threat detection and response.

SIEM (“sim”) is a cybersecurity acronym for security information and event management. Part of traditional IT security, SIEM solutions collect and analyze asset and event logs and other data to support threat detection and management. By aggregating and analyzing event data from an enterprise’s networks and other assets, SIEM tools help monitor for and detect anomalies, alerting the security operations center to potential threats.

One of the purposes of SIEM in cybersecurity is to deliver complete visibility into assets and events across the IT environment. However, as the number of unmanaged devices on organizations’ networks increases, traditional SIEM solutions are unable to detect  a growing proportion of digital assets and suspicious events.

When SIEM detects a potential threat, it generates an alert for the security team to review. Based on that review, the team may decide to take immediate action, prioritize the alert as a lower-level threat, or determine that the alert is a false positive. The accuracy of the context and information the team relies on to make these decisions depends on the quality and completeness of the data and logs gathered by the SIEM solution.

The more contextual data that the SIEM provides, and the more integrated the data is across systems, the more useful it is for threat response. At large organizations, the volume of SIEM alerts — an average of 11,000 per day (Forrester) — can pose challenges to the security team’s ability to evaluate and respond to threats.

Prior to the rapid introduction of large numbers of unmanaged assets, including IoT, IIoT, IoMT, and smart devices, and when OT and ICS hardware was was “air-gapped”, SIEM security was considered comprehensive. Now, with OT/IT convergence accelerating and unmanaged devices comprising at least 37% of enterprise devices, SIEM solutions can’t see and protect everything in the modern environment.

A solution that provides total visibility of unmanaged and managed devices, continuous device activity monitoring, and easy integration with other tools can enhance the value of SIEM in cybersecurity while providing the context and data unification security teams need for effective responses.

Armis Centrix™ feeds comprehensive device data—for every type of IT, OT and IoT asset— to SIEMs for better decision making, faster responses, and comprehensive reporting.

Threat intelligence is information that is collected, processed, and analyzed to help organizations better understand a threat actor’s motives and behaviors. Threat intelligence allows teams to think ahead and, in turn, react accordingly.

Types of threat intelligence include:

• Strategic — Broader trends that are typically meant for a non-technical audience.
• Tactical — Outlines of the tactics, techniques, and procedures of threat actors for a more technical audience.
• Operational — Technical details about specific attacks and campaigns.

Threat intelligence strengthens an organization’s security posture by:

• Allowing teams to prepare and mitigate attacks before they occur.
• Providing an actionable way for organizations to enhance their security posture.
• Empowering stakeholders to invest wisely, make smart and quick decisions and reduce risks.

Taking steps to understand the actions and behaviors of a cyberattacker puts an organization one step ahead of an unauthorized user. By being proactive and thinking forward, everyone can benefit from the perks of threat intelligence.

The cyber threat intelligence lifecycle typically goes through a six-part data collection, processing, and analysis process. Here’s how it works:

1. Planning and direction. Start by asking the right questions, such as who would be attacking? What is the attack surface? How would an attacker infiltrate the network? What actions should be taken to prevent an attack from taking place?
2. Collection. Gather data based on the requirements from the initial question. Teams can collect information from data logs, industry experts, online forums, and other relevant sources.
3. Processing. After collecting data, begin organizing and processing the information. Organize the information into spreadsheets and determine what is relevant to the initial questions.
4. Analysis. Based on your findings, analyze the data and find potential security issues. Once you have identified weak spots, come up with possible solutions and action items.
5. Dissemination. After the data collection, the information is distributed to the intended audience. Findings should be delivered in a digestible format and given to the stakeholders.
6. Feedback. Once a conclusion is reached, the person who made the initial request should reassess the results to determine if they answered their question. If the answer remains unsolved, repeat the lifecycle to find a new solution.

EDR stands for endpoint detection and response. EDR is a security strategy that matters now more than ever given the skyrocketing growth of endpoints across the internet of things (IoT), internet of medical things (IoMT), OT, 5G, and smart devices. Every new endpoint expands an organization’s attack surface, and many endpoints are unmanaged and effectively invisible to legacy security tools and solutions.

In addition to traditional endpoints like on-premises desktop computers and servers, today’s endpoints can include everything from virtual machines and cloud data storage to wireless security cameras, smartwatches, connected industrial control system (ICS) devices, and more. An even wider view of endpoints includes “network switches, routers, load balancers, firewalls, and VoIP apps” — in short, an endpoint can be defined as “anything that can be identified, addressed, or attacked.”

Endpoints can also be defined or classified by their behavior. For example, wireless security cameras are stationary by design, while tablets are mobile. Each endpoint will have its own communication timing and volume profile, a list of cloud services that it accesses, and specific tunnels that it may use. Depending on the type of data they handle and the organization’s security practices, endpoint communication may or may not be encrypted.

The challenge in endpoint detection now is that most cyber devices are unmanaged and unagentable. Traditional security scans can’t detect them and may interfere with their functionality. Devices with certain wireless connectivity protocols may be invisible to legacy security solutions that look for Ethernet and Wi-Fi connections but can’t see Bluetooth, NFC, and other newer protocols.

Without a complete view of all endpoints across the environment, organizations are more vulnerable to a host of security threats, including the remote takeover of control systems, network intrusions via unpatched vulnerabilities in device firmware and software, ransomware attacks, and data theft. For example, unmanaged devices represent 31% of Log4j threats detected by Armis. Without a complete inventory of all endpoints and real-time insight into their activity, such threats may go undetected.

The “response” element in EDR includes responding to vulnerabilities and to threats. An EDR solution that can compare each endpoint to a device knowledgebase to identify and remediate vulnerabilities can reduce the risk of real-time threats. An EDR tool that also monitors endpoint behavior — including communication frequency, destination, and encryption status — can raise real-time alerts when a device or other endpoint is behaving abnormally.

XDR and SOAR solutions offer organizations security capabilities and enhanced protection but the terms are not interchangeable. Learn more about the similarities and differences between these cybersecurity technologies and how they can help secure your IT environment.

Extended detection and response (XDR) is a cybersecurity solution that collects and analyzes data from multiple sources to provide detection, analytics, and response across endpoints, networks, servers, cloud workloads, and more.

XDR benefits

XDR provides several security benefits such as:

• Protection from attacks — Integrated antivirus and threat intelligence can block malware and fileless attacks. Analytics and custom rules can detect threat actors and other attacks.
• Quick and custom notifications — XDR automatically reacts to varying threats. With custom alerts, organizations can receive alerts and notifications when a specific event arises.
• Collection and analysis from multiple sources — XDR can monitor, collect, and analyze data from various data points across your network. The data trends can help spot suspicious activity within your organization’s network. With XDR’s artificial intelligence (AI), your security system becomes more effective and secure over time.

Security orchestration, automation, and response (SOAR) is a stack of compatible software programs that enables an organization to collect data about security threats and respond to security events without human assistance. The purpose of a SOAR platform is to improve the efficiency of physical and digital security operations.

SOAR use cases

SOAR offers several cybersecurity benefits to prevent potential threat actors and unauthorized users from infiltrating a network. Below are examples of common SOAR use cases:

• Managing phishing attacks — Phishing emails are one of the most common strategies used by cyber attackers to gain information. It would be time-consuming for Security Operations Center (SOC) teams to dedicate their time to investigating every phishing email that comes through an employee’s inbox. SOAR tools can help combat phishing attacks by relying on automated systems to filter suspicious emails rather than human intuition.
• Threat hunting — SOAR solutions collect and ingest information from indicators of compromise (IOC), which aid in the act of threat hunting, detection, and remediation.
• Incident response — SOAR platforms can automate security incident response actions to future threats to improve security operations.

Though XDR and SOAR are software and technologies that focus on collection and response to threat actors, both cybersecurity solutions have key differences.

SOAR is complex, costly, and requires a highly mature SOC to implement and maintain partner integrations and playbooks. XDR solutions consolidate multiple products into a unified security solution that provides actionability from the XDR platform to connected security tools.

SOAR platforms usually focus on incident response actions, while XDR solutions tend to lack this ability and instead automate single actions in response to data.

The average total cost of a data breach in 2021 was $4.24 million—a 10% increase from 2020, according to the IBM Security Cost of a Data Breach Report 2021. Depending on the organization’s security posture, the cost of a breach can drastically vary.

IBM reported four key categories that contribute to the cost of a data breach: lost business cost (38%), detection and escalation (29%), post-breach response (27%), and notification (6%).

Lost business cost

Lost business represents the largest share of total breach costs. On average, lost business costs $1.59 million. The category includes increased customer turnover, lost revenue due to system downtime, and costs associated with acquiring new business to mitigate damaged reputation.

Detection and escalation

Following lost business costs, a large amount of money goes towards detection and escalation. On average, $1.24 million is spent on detecting a breach and dealing with the fallout. Activity that falls under this category includes investigative activity, auditing services, crisis management, and internal communication.

Post-breach response

Another $1.14 million goes towards the post-breach response.T he post-breach incident response describes actions taken after the fallout and towards communicating with data breach victims to rectify the situation. Examples of post-breach activities include help desk communications, legal expenses, product or service discounts, and regulatory fines.

Notification

On average, $270,000 goes towards any costs to notify data breach victims, internal teams, and any affected third parties. Examples of activity under this category include any communication to data subjects, regulators, or external experts.

IBM also lists the following additional costs to consider when recovering a data breach:

• Time to discovery. The more time it takes for an organization to identify and contain a data breach, the more expensive it will cost to recover from it.
• The number of exposed records. Breaches affecting 50 and 65 million records cost roughly 100x more than average breaches of 1,000-100,000 records.
• Ransomware. On average, recovery from a ransomware attack costs 10% more than the average data breach.

Extended detection and response (XDR) is a security solution that collects and analyzes data from multiple sources to detect, prevent, discover, and respond to cyberattacks and unauthorized misuse. Forrester Research defines XDR security as “the evolution of EDR, which optimizes threat detection, investigation, response, and hunting in real-time.”

XDR capabilities

XDR aims to address three fundamental issues in security:

• Efficacy of detections — XDR detects compromised credentials, malicious insiders, and external attacks. Through traffic monitoring and analysis, XDR can identify a threat even after it has bypassed a system perimeter.
• Speed and response of investigation — Once the suspicious activity has been detected, tools can create attack timelines and activity logs. Data from these tools can help teams determine the cause of an attack and predict the attacker’s behavior, which allows the team to respond swiftly.
• Flexible deployments — XDR solutions provide teams with additional benefits over time. Machine learning ensures that solutions become increasingly more effective with use.

Security information and event management (SIEM) is a solution that aggregates and analyzes activity from several different resources across your entire IT system for monitoring and response against cyberthreats.

SIEM is the combination of Security Event Management (SEM) with Security Information Management (SIM)—offering data analysis for both event and log information.

The purpose of SIEM products is to create and notify security operations center (SOC) teams about occurrences at the application and network hardware levels to prompt the teams to investigate and remediate the problem if necessary.

XDR and SIEM solutions collect and analyze network data for contextual threat awareness. However, SIEMs do not automatically orchestrate real-time responses to cyber threats across multiple endpoints.

SIEM is a log collection tool to support compliance, storage, and analysis, while XDR focuses on endpoint data and optimization. XDR covers areas that SIEM does not since XDR has advanced capabilities that can focus on the highest priority events.

A denial of service (DoS) attack is a cyberattack that prevents legitimate users from gaining access to services and resources by flooding the target network with fake traffic to overload systems and prevent legitimate traffic.

A DoS attack uses a single IP address as its source, but a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack uses multiple addresses—making this type of DoS attack more challenging to fight. DDoS attacks operate with numerous machines to attack a single target server. Botnets, a group of internet-connected devices controlled by the attacker, are often used to perform a large-scale DDoS attack.

Companies should take precautions to avoid flood attacks and minimize damage if attackers target them. Consider the actions below:

• Monitor traffic. Enroll in a DoS or DDoS protection service that spots suspicious traffic and redirects it from your network.
• Reduce the attack surface. Keep track of inventory such as legacy, IoT, and shadow IT devices to mitigate risks from attackers.
• Make a response plan. Prepare a strategy before a DoS attack takes place to mitigate any damages that may occur if and when a cyberattack happens.

The term zero-day is used when security teams are unaware of software vulnerabilities and have had no time (0 days) to design a patch or update to resolve the issue. Zero-day malware attack is caused by a zero-day vulnerability, which is an unknown security flaw that a threat actor can target and exploit.

Zero-day malware is a malicious software that takes advantage of zero-day vulnerabilities. Often, bad actors can create malware faster than software developers can release and deploy a corresponding patch for the same vulnerability.

For example, many devices affected by URGENT/11 — a set of 11 zero-day vulnerabilities in VxWorks — still remain unpatched. The time gap between development and deployment leaves organizations susceptible to real time cybersecurity attacks, as zero-day malware can spread widely before teams can clamp down on the security threat.

Responding to a zero-day attack can be exhausting, especially when a software vendor is taking a considerable time in designing a fix.

These are five ways you can protect against zero-day attacks:

1. Vulnerability management

Vulnerability management is the periodic process of monitoring, identifying, evaluating, reporting, managing, and remediating cyber flaws across workloads, endpoints, and systems.

2. Threat intelligence

Cyber threat intelligence solutions monitor devices, users, and network traffic, leveraging artificial intelligence (AI) to identify patterns and signs of compromise. This capability allows these tools to identify zero-day malware campaigns early, enabling organizations to prioritize remediation and avoid threat escalation.

3. Patch management

A patch is a specific set of updates that developers use to fix known technical issues or security vulnerabilities. Often a short-term solution until the next full software update, a patch may include the addition of new functions and features to an application. An effective patch management process comprises a review of previous patches, an assessment of the severity of a vulnerability to determine priorities, and a test of compatibility with multiple security patches across different endpoints.

4. Web application firewall (WAF)

A WAF is a security tool at the application level that protects organizations by monitoring, filtering, and analyzing hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP) traffic between the application and the web. WAF blocks malicious requests before they reach the application or the user.

5. Network segmentation

In the event of a zero-day threat, your primary goal should be to limit the potential damage. Security teams should implement network segmentation, which restricts user access to certain segments of the network, limiting the damage in case of a compromise.

A vulnerability is a known weakness or flaw within your digital assets that malicious actors can exploit. In cybersecurity, risk is a prediction of how much an organization stands to lose in the event of an attack, in terms of stolen or damaged assets. A cyber threat exploits a vulnerability and increases the risk to your systems, data, and assets.

Understanding the differences between risk vs vulnerability can help security professionals better optimize their vulnerability management programs and minimize cyber risk to their organizations.

The CVSS is a ranking system that marks the severity of known vulnerabilities. Vulnerabilities from the National Vulnerability Database (NVD) are given a score of 1-10 to indicate a severity rating of low, medium, high, or critical. These scores are based on the characteristics of a vulnerability across different user environments.

The CVSS is not a measure of risk but cybersecurity teams can still use the ranking to compare vulnerabilities and quickly prioritize the high-risk ones for remediation. However, vulnerability scores often lack business context and may lead to ineffective remediation processes.

Discover how Armis increases vulnerability visibility to help you understand asset risk.

While the CVSS is a general-purpose ranking system, risk scores are tailored to organizations, taking into account their assets, exposure to cyber threats, and the impact of the vulnerabilities found. Security teams are given contextual data-based scores that help them understand the risk factor and decide which vulnerabilities to remediate first.

Risk scores help remediation teams filter out vulnerabilities that pose little to no risk, so organizations can better manage risk and improve cybersecurity.

Vulnerability management is a technical practice that maps the “output of information security technology to define the risk priorities for organizations.” Mapping and managing vulnerabilities requires several processes, including:

• Assessing threats and vulnerabilities.
• Knowing acceptable configurations and policies.
• Identifying deviations from those accepted practices.
• Determining risk levels.
• Offering remediation and mitigation recommendations.

As more unmanaged devices — Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) sensors, connected medical equipment, operational technology (OT) and industrial control systems (ICS) devices, smart TVs, and other devices — become part of an organization’s connected environment, the number and variety of potential vulnerabilities increases. At the same time, these kinds of devices often don’t appear on traditional security scans, and scans can impede unmanaged device function or cause them to stop working altogether.

With so many connected devices coming online all the time (56 billion worldwide by 2025), attackers are increasingly focused on device vulnerability identification and exploitation. Traditional scans not only miss or potentially disrupt unmanaged devices, but traditional scanning schedules may also overlook the emergence of newly identified vulnerabilities, creating a time gap during which attacks can proliferate. In order to keep the enterprise secure, identifying and managing vulnerabilities at scale and at speed is more important than ever.

Device discovery, OS and software identification, and vulnerability assessment are still critical elements for effective vulnerability management, but traditional agent-based scans can’t fully deliver those capabilities.

Today, enterprises need an agentless platform that can discover all devices in the environment without disrupting their functions, and that can continuously monitor those devices for known or new vulnerabilities. That approach requires the ability to compare discovered devices to a database of similar devices to get a baseline for firmware, software, and normal (or abnormal) device behavior.

Device behavior monitoring is critical because anomalous behavior is an early indicator of a vulnerability, threat, or incident. A comprehensive solution will learn each device’s communication profile, such as its position within the network or environment, which devices it communicates with, which protocol it uses, and communication frequency and volume. When a device behaves outside its normal range, the solution can alert the security team, enforce automated policies, and isolate or disconnect the device.

According to the 2022 FBI Internet Crimes Report, IC3 received a total of 800,944 reported complaints, with losses exceeding $10.3 billion. While the total number of complaints decreased by 5%, dollar losses increased significantly by 49%.

Critical infrastructure protection (CIP) is the need to protect the key infrastructure networks of buildings, utilities, and transportation systems essential to maintaining society. Governments aim to protect their communities from terrorist activity, natural disasters, and cyber threats.

Here are the 16 critical infrastructure sectors, based on the Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA):

• Chemical — Includes companies that produce industrial chemicals.
• Commercial facilities — Includes sites that draw crowds of people for shopping, business, entertainment, or lodging.
• Communications — Includes telecommunications/telephone companies and internet service providers.
• Critical manufacturing — Includes companies in the mechanical, physical, or chemical transformation of materials, substances, or components into new products.
• Dams — Includes dam projects, hurricane barriers, and other water retention and control facilities.
• Defense industrial base — Includes research and development of military systems.
• Emergency services — Includes emergency response teams.
• Energy — Includes companies involved in producing and distributing energy, such as fossil fuel, electrical power, nuclear, and renewable energy.
• Financial services — Includes businesses that manage money such as credit unions, banks, and credit card companies.
• Food and agriculture — Includes farms, restaurants, and registered food manufacturing, processing, and storage facilities.
• Government facilities — Includes general-use office buildings for government purposes such as courthouses, embassies, national laboratories, and more.
• Healthcare and public health — Includes all institutes dedicated to protecting the economy from hazards such as infectious disease outbreaks, natural disasters, and terrorism.
• Information technology sector — Includes companies that produce software, hardware, or semiconductor equipment, and organizations that provide internet or related services.
• Nuclear reactors, materials, and waste — Includes nuclear reactors, nuclear fuel cycle facilities, and other radioactive sources.
• Transportation systems — Includes services and transport systems to safely and securely move goods across the country and overseas.
• Water and wastewater systems — Includes drinking water and wastewater infrastructures.

A DoS attack is a malicious attempt to render a machine or network inaccessible to its intended users by hampering the device’s normal functionality. Malicious actors launch these attacks by sending information and unusual traffic or other hazardous activity that triggers a system crash.

In addition to manipulating network packets, malicious actors may exploit logical, programming, or resource-handling vulnerabilities to render services unavailable for valid users.

Perpetrators of DoS attacks often target high-profile institutions such as government agencies, trade organizations, banks, media, and manufacturing organizations and exploit denial-of-service vulnerabilities with the intent to overwhelm their systems and cause disruption.

Here’s how different types of DoS attacks work:

Buffer overflow attacks

Buffers are temporary storage regions during data transfer. A buffer overflow occurs when the data to be transferred exceeds the available memory. This denial-of-service vulnerability can cause a machine to exhaust the capacity of available memory, hard disks, and CPU time. Buffer overflow attacks often lead to system crashes, sluggish behavior, and other abnormal server behaviors, resulting in a denial of service.

Flood attacks

In this attack, cyberattackers oversaturate server capacity with an overwhelming amount of packets (the basic unit of communication over a network), flooding the target system and causing a denial of service. For a successful DoS flood attack, the attacker needs more bandwidth capacity than the target system.

Distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack

Malicious actors use multiple systems to orchestrate a synchronized attack on a single target. The significant difference is that while DoS attacks often originate from one single computer, DDoS attacks come from multiple systems and locations.

Differentiating between a general issue — such as heavy bandwidth consumption or poor network connectivity — and a DoS attack can be challenging.

Here are indicators of compromise that suggest a denial of service vulnerability has led to an attack:

• All devices on a given network lose connectivity abruptly.
• Specific components of a website, such as a web property, are unable to load.
• Slow network performance, such as long website load times.

Vulnerability management is crucial to identifying risks and attack surfaces that threat actors can exploit. With Armis Centrix™, you can assess vulnerabilities, prioritize which ones pose the biggest risk to your business, minimize the risk of a denial-of-service attack, and strengthen your overall security posture.