Teramind

Cyber Security for Energy and Utilities

Unified Insider Threat Detection, Data Loss Prevention, and Compliance Management with Teramind

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Teramind’s Cyber Security for the Energy and Utilities Sector

The energy and utilities industry has historically been inundated with threats from external sources. These energy sector cyber threats include hackers, environmental activists, and industrial and state espionage.

Thanks to these many threats, utility, and energy cyber security have become a top concern for many businesses. The good news is, businesses have worked hard to develop utility and energy cyber security.

These efforts have made it more difficult for outside attackers. However, that doesn’t mean the energy sector cyber threats aren’t still a growing concern. Criminals have now turned to enlist insiders, employees, and contractors.

Hackers use these insiders to gain access to important information and critical systems. Insiders, hackers, and other energy sector cyber threats use methods like:

  • Social engineering
  • ID theft
  • Impersonation
  • Baits
  • Collusion

While the cost of insider incidents varies by industry, energy and utilities remain one of the highest. The energy and utility industries spend millions to contain the damage caused by energy sector cyber threats.

The energy and utility sector is also highly collaborative. Larger companies often utilize outside contractors for a variety of important tasks. A third party can easily expose the company to great financial, IP, and other risks .

Consulting firms also work with multiple oil and gas companies to provide design and engineering services. These firms often need to share confidential and sensitive information. This information may include:

  • Reservoir data
  • Seismic reading
  • Future exploration sites

Consulting firms are often prime targets for energy sector cyber threats. Competitors, criminals, and even their customers all target consulting firms for their invaluable trade secrets.

Employees, vendors, and contractors in the energy and utility industry have access to important information on a regular basis. That's why it's important to secure crucial resources and information for both products and services.

Teramind Combines Insider Threat Detection and DLP for Holistic Cyber Security for Energy and Utilities

With Teramind, energy and utility companies can monitor and protect critical infrastructure. Businesses can also safeguard the information of future plans, trade secrets, IP, and customer information.

Teramind also helps businesses meet compliance goals for NERC, FISMA, ISO 27001. The Teramind platform includes a powerful policy and rules engine, forensic audit, and reporting features.

Here are a few expels of what an energy or utility company can achieve with Teramind’s platform:

  • Gain visibility into the user activity of critical infrastructure assets for both OT and IT systems, including:
    • Endpoints
    • Servers
    • Terminals
    • Back office systems
    • Front office systems
  • Prevent stealing of high-value intellectual property.
  • Extend monitoring and control to partners, vendors, consultants, and other third parties.
  • Restrict modification of system software, access elevation, malicious code execution, and other potentially harmful activity by privileged users.
  • Protect customer information, employee privacy, and corporate data.
Teramind for Energy & Utilities value diagram

How Teramind Helps the Energy and Utilities Industry

  • Monitor Critical Systems and Users

    Teramind monitors all user activity over endpoints, servers/terminal servers, network, and cloud for 12+ system objects like:

    • Websites
    • Applications
    • Emails
    • Files
    • On-screen content (OCR)

  • Detect Insider Threats

    Intelligent behavior analysis can detect malicious activity and anomalies that indicate deviation from normal behavior. Use the powerful Policy & Rules Editor to create rules to define what constitutes insider threats.

    When a rule violation is detected, Teramind takes immediate action against users like:

    • Warn
    • Block
    • Lockout
    • Take remote control of a system, etc.

  • Discover & Categorize Sensitive Data Automatically

    Deep content inspection in both structured and unstructured data accurately identifies classified and confidential information. Teramind also supports real-time content discovery with advanced OCR, digital fingerprinting, and tagging.

  • Safeguard Data and IP

    Protect sensitive information from falling into the wrong hands.

  • Enable Secure Collaboration

    Use a combination of servers to allow your partners to collaborate on projects in a secure sandbox. Record their activities, restrict access or take control of the server in case of an incident. Taking control allows your operation immune from disruption.

  • Conduct Cyber security Risk Assessment

    Dynamic risk scoring and scanning identify at-risk employees, policies, and system resources. Detect, analyze, and prioritize security gaps before they can be exploited.

  • Manage Compliance

    Conform with security and regulatory standards, including:

    • NERC
    • FISMA
    • FERC
    • ISO 27001
    • GDPR, etc.

    Speedup standard implementation with flexible Policy & Rules editor and various monitoring and reporting features.

  • Protect Your Operations from 3rd-Party Threats

    Monitor third-party vendors, contractors, and consultants who have access to your critical systems to prevent sabotage or data theft.

  • Investigate Incidents with Forensics and Auditing Tools

    Teramind’s powerful utilities and energy cyber security system includes:

    • Video recording of all employee activity
    • Audio recording
    • Sessions recording
    • Immutable logs
    • Alerts
    • Optional OCR

    Together they provide a vast collection of investigative data to locate the source of an insider threat with pinpoint accuracy.

  • Coordinate Security Orchestration for Rapid Response

    Integrate Teramind with Intrusion Detection/Prevention Systems (IDS/ IPS), Access Control, Threat Analytics, and SIEM systems.

    Create a cyber security perimeter across your stores, supply chain network, and corporate offices. Share threat intelligence and coordinate response with analysts, CSO, MSSP, and security teams.

  • Staff Awareness and Training

    Insights can be used to train new employees about energy cyber security best practices.

Energy and Utilities Sectors are Major Targets of Cyber Attacks

Cyber Security for the Utilities Industry is a Major Concern
A survey of 600 electric utility executives found that cyber and physical security was the most pressing concerns for them. Source: UtilityDive.

72%

Agree Cyber & Physical Security is Important or Very Important

Utilities Saw a Significant Growth in Data Breaches
In 2020, Kroll research shows an average 400% growth in breach notification cases for the utilities industry which experienced five or more breaches in 2019. Source: Kroll.

400%

Growth in Data Breaches from 2019 to 2020

Insiders are Oil, Gas, and the Energy Sector’s Top Cyber Threat
In a survey of OT experts, 65% said the top cyber security threat was a careless insider. While 15% said the malicious insider was the top cyber security threat. Source: Ponemon & Symantec.

65%

Negligent Insiders

15%

Malicious Insiders

Insider Threats Cost Energy & Utilities Companies Millions
Companies in energy and utilities incurred an average costs of $11.54 million in insider threat related incidents. Source: Proofpoint.

$11.54M

Cost of Insider Threats for Energy & Utilities

Teramind’s Cyber Security for Energy and Utilities Helps Companies Protect Sensitive Data

Energy

  • Exploration, survey, seismic and other research data.
  • Process flow, pipeline flow diagram, engineering designs.
  • Oil/gas drilling data like prospecting related terms, confidential/CB well list, Coalbed data etc.
  • Business plans, legal data.

Critical Infrastructure / Utilities

  • Distribution plans, software design documents, SCADA terms.
  • Vendor Contracts.
  • Business plans, legal data.
  • Customer Data, Personally identifiable information (PII), Consumer-specific Energy Usage Data (CEUD), Customer proprietary network information (CPNI).

Corporate Data

  • Business processes and strategic plans.
  • Price/cost/supplier/customer lists.
  • Source code, formulas, patents and other types of IPs.
  • Acquisition plans, M&A announcements, legal documents and other confidential matters.
  • Payroll, accounting and financial data.

And More...

  • Billing/invoice, tax/VAT, GST/HST, enrollment and payment related data.
  • GDPR special data categories (trade union data, biometric, geo location).
  • For Official Use Only (FOUO), Confidential and Protected file tags.
  • Federal Tax Information (FTI), Covered Financial Information (GLBA) etc.




Teramind Delivers Cyber Security for Energy and Utilities with Insider Threat Detection and Data Security

Real-Time Visibility and Control

Teramind visually records every action that a user makes on your Operation Technology (OT) and IT systems. IT systems include:

  • Endpoints
  • Servers
  • Terminal servers
  • Network
  • Cloud
  • DMZ

Uncover what your employees are up to, both online and offline. Each object can be configured to take into consideration what needs to be monitored. You can also decide who has access to the monitored records.

You can specify who you want to monitor, how much you want to monitor, when and for how long. Monitoring allows for instant administrative oversight in respect to all user activity while complying with any privacy requirements.

Automated Data Discovery and Classification

Teramind’s energy cyber security system has built-in templates for many classified and unclassified data types. You’ll be able to protect your customer data, IP, and other sensitive information.

Custom data types can easily be created using flexible regular expression (RegEx) and natural language definitions.

Combine OCR and fingerprinting with multiple logic, file origin, file properties, and data content. The combination of systems allows you to discover and protect:

  • Confidential exploration
  • Production data
  • Engineering design
  • Technical design
  • Source codes
  • Contract

Powerful Policies and Rules Engine

The core of the Teramind’s energy cyber security platform is its automation. Teramind comes with hundreds of pre-defined policies and rules. For example:

  • Block email containing sensitive keywords
  • Stop uploading of a confidential document
  • Detect screen capture
  • Prevent the use of external drives

The templates cover virtually every use case of data loss prevention, insider threat detection, and compliance requirements. Just pick a policy or rule template, and the condition will be set automatically for you to edit.

Endpoint Data Loss Prevention & Egress Control

Teramind’s cyber security for energy and utilities helps you put controls in place. Controls can be used to monitor and prevent illicit sharing of information. For example:

  • File transfer rules to block the use of removable media
  • Clipboard rules to prevent sharing of confidential information
  • Network rules to restrict download and upload operations
  • Application rules to limit or disable social media and IMs

There are hundreds of use cases where Teramind’s energy cyber security system proactively defended data.

Behavioral Anomaly Detection

Use the energy cyber security system to constitute what is considered dangerous or harmful user behavior. Teramind’s engine will automatically detect when a user deviates from their normal parameters or exceeds acceptable risk levels.

For example, get notified if a user sends too many attachments or prints more pages than normal. Teramind can detect anomalies in:

  • Applications
  • Emails
  • Network
  • File activities
  • Printing

Immediately get notified about harmful activity to stop malicious and fraudulent actions.

Privileged User and Third-Party Monitoring

Teramind allows organizations to create profiles for privileged users, contractors, and other third parties. After profiles are created, you can define what information and system resources each profile can access.

Further rules can be set up by behavior policies. Rules can then be used to segregate information on a need-to-know basis.

Rules can also be created to notify the authorities of any suspicious privileged user activity, such as:

  • Unscheduled logins
  • Creation of backdoor accounts
  • Unauthorized changes to system configuration
  • A contractor trying to access restricted databases

Security Sandbox

Teramind allows you to create virtual servers on Windows, VMware Horizon, etc. Utilizing this capability, you can, set up a Terminal Server.

These external users can then log in to the server using RDP keeping out of your internal network and repositories. At the same time, you can record their activities separately, restrict access or take control of the server.

In case of an incident, you can keep the rest of your business will remain undisturbed and running smoothly.

Digital Forensics and Auditing

Detailed alerts for all users can be viewed, including any security incidents and what actions were taken. Warning messages can be configured within the energy cyber security system to inform the users about nonconformity and influence corrective behavior.

Session recordings and history playback can be gathered in the energy cyber security system. All of the information collected can be used for audit and evidence gathering purposes.

Risk Assessment and Treatment

Teramind’s cyber security for energy and utilities system has a dedicated risk dashboard. Within the risk dashboard, the CSO and security analysts can conduct a risk assessment.

Risk can be profiled by users, departments, or by system objects. Reports can be derived by the severity of risks or by how many times security violations occurred.

Unique risk scores help you identify high-risk users or policies so that plans can be developed for treating the risks.

Compliance Management

Teramind comes with support for implementing compliance and standards like NERC CIP Standards for Electric Utilities:

  • FISMA
  • FERC
  • ISO 27001
  • GDPR

Our flexible Policy and Rules Editor can help you develop your own specific security, privacy, etiquette, and acceptable use policies. You can also use these features to conform with any regional data privacy and notification laws applicable to your organization.

Teramind is Ranked #1 by:



And others.

Have a Look

Cyber Security Software for Energy and Utilities with Flexible Deployment Options

Teramind Cloud - trust us the management of the Teramind deployment and infrastructure. Only install Teramind Agents on the machines you want to monitor and set up your users, policies and rules and let us take care of the rest.

Teramind On-Premise - control the Teramind implementation in its entirety. Stay off the cloud if that’s your firm’s operational model. Additionally, you can leverage LDAP groups and users to identify which users and groups to apply which policies and rules to.

Teramind Private Cloud - use your own secure, scalable private cloud implementation including AWS. Azure and more.

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