Tenable OT Security Brings Visibility, Security, & Control to Operational Technology Systems

Since the 90s, Hollywood has perpetrated the image of hackers being able to brute force their way into critical infrastructure. Over the last few years, that movie magic has become a worrying reality.

Amir Hirsh, the SVP and general manager of OT Security at Tenable, told us, “As we become dependent on our OT environment and OT assets to run both our day-to-day lives and our operational business, the operations of our business, the criminals have realized that and understood that that's the crown jewels. That's what they're attacking.”

By December 2023, there were 317 reported cyberattacks against health care and 243 against schools, approximately a 30 percent increase in attacks from 2022. With IT and OT environments increasing in complexity, playing defense has become more difficult.

“The challenge behind protecting our OT environments is because it's a mixture of all technology, sometimes of protocols that we're not accustomed to protecting and that the InfoSec team knows a little bit less than what they're accustomed in our IT environment,” Amir says.

Modern IT environments have wide attack surfaces, necessitating a platform like Tenable OT Security for effective management. This solution integrates with Tenable One, Tenable’s exposure management platform, which allows customers to contextualize data and resolve issues before they can be exploited.

Amir explains, “We're experts in OT environments … we know everything that runs in it, all protocols, all devices. We develop the active scanning capabilities that knows how to speak to those devices. We're also experts in the IT environment, bringing Nessus and Tenable IT scanning capabilities to those IT assets within that environment allows us to deploy the correct protocols to the correct devices.”

MSPs and MSSPs have played a vital role in developing Tenable’s technology, which in turn, allows Tenable to provide channel partners their best solutions.

“Tenable focuses on empowering our channels to build their business around our technology. They can build deployment configurations following the recommendation they operate within the customer's environment to protect it and secure it across all the customer's needs,” Amir says. “This allows our MSSPs to get very concise results and recommendations of operations, and scale their business empowered by our technology.”

Maintaining a secure environment will continue to challenge business for the foreseeable future, and IT teams will need tools such as Tenable OT to protect them.