Securing Electric Utilities with EmberOT

Jori VanAntwerp

CEO and Founder at EmberOT || Web

For over two decades, Jori has enabled industrial and IT organizations to be successful in reducing risk, increasing compliance, and improving their overall security efforts. He has had the pleasure of working with companies such as Gravwell, Dragos, CrowdStrike, FireEye, McAfee, and is now CEO & Founder at EmberOT, a cybersecurity startup focused on making security a reality for critical infrastructure.

Electric utilities face a litany of specific challenges when it comes to security. Supply chain woes, disparate systems, and meager security budgets make it difficult for organizations to monitor and protect their environments effectively.

Technological advancements in the electric utility industry have helped utility companies to take reliability, safety, and efficiency into their own hands, but they can be a double-edged sword that also increases the overall attack surface of energy infrastructure.

Challenges Specific to Electric Utilities

The electric utility sector navigates many of the same challenges other critical infrastructure segments do, like managing disparate networks with scant resources and weathering supply chain delays. But electric utilities must be especially vigilant about their specific challenges that create potentially catastrophic vulnerabilities. These include:

• Difficulty gaining the visibility necessary to monitor the full industrial environment, especially at the OT edge.
• Challenges operating and maintaining systems from any location or with a distributed workforce.
• A reliance on hardware-dependent legacy systems that results in limited flexibility.
• Stuck in reactive (versus proactive) mode regarding security threats and anomalous network activity.

Securing Electric Utilities with EmberOT

EmberOT’s vendor-agnostic software addresses theses electric utility challenges. Using EmberOT’s software, operators and asset owners gain visibility into the data living at the edges of their networks. Operators can harness data from everywhere, even the OT edge, to improve operations, reliability, and security, and to ensure regulatory compliance.

Our ultra-small software footprint allows sensors to be installed on almost anything within the electric utility’s existing infrastructure (including DIN-rail devices, side-loaded, compute modules, and in virtual or containerized environments). 

The onramp to visibility, security, and compliance is short thanks to the ability to install EmberOT on almost anything. Since the Ember sensor only needs four cores and 4GB of RAM to run effectively, your total cost of ownership is significantly reduced.

Visibility & Risk Reduction

With EmberOT’s software, your team can fully leverage comprehensive visibility into your OT networks:

• Gain visibility into all areas of operation, and send curated data anywhere, including your SIEM, SOAR, or MSSP.
  
• Make the collection, analysis, and transport of data flexible and scalable.

Monitoring & Defense

Secure your electric utility operations and defend your systems in near real-time thanks to EmberOT’s quick and flexible deployment. Your team will be empowered to:

• Monitor and detect operational and cyber events as they happen.
• Remediate anomalous activities, whether cyber or otherwise, before they impact your operations.

Compliance & Regulation

From NERC CIP to FERC NOPR (and all of the other acronyms), we know that proving and maintaining regulatory compliance is critical for securing electric utilities. EmberOT enables your team to create efficiencies in compliance by:

• Providing baselines, packet capture, and detection for compliance and to meet regulatory requirements.
• Collecting data from your entire network, even legacy environments, and delivering information to existing technologies and compliance workflows.

Take action with EmberOT

EmberOT supplies operators with the data they need to provide proactive and adaptive cybersecurity for energy infrastructure. With software that installs on almost anything, you won’t be beholden to a hardware-dependent vendor with supply chain delays. 

Being vendor-agnostic means we have the ability to pull data from anywhere within your infrastructure and send it to any SIEM, SOAR, MSSP, or anywhere it’s needed within your existing workflows. 

EmberOT empowers your team to overcome whatever industrial cybersecurity threats lie ahead. Contact us or request a demo to explore how EmberOT can help your operators on their quest of monitoring and securing electric utilities.

~Jori 🤘🔥