Welcome to CXO Talk. I'm Michael Krigsman, and we're
discussing how AI can protect operational technology and
critical infrastructure. We're speaking with Anand Oswal
from Palo Alto Networks. Palo Alto Network is a leading
cybersecurity company in the world.
Our mission is to make everyday more safer than the day before.
At Palo Alto Networks, I'm the SVP and general manager of
Network security. Anon, we're talking about
operational technology, OT and information technology IT.
Give us some background here. We think of operational
technology, think of factory flows, manufacturing facilities,
think of utility, oil and gas mining.
These environments have high value assets and there's a big
difference between IT environments and OT
environments. First, IT environments typically
are usually always connected. OT environments are trying to
get connected now, but they're also mission critical in nature.
If an OT asset goes down, it can mean a big downtime for a
factory floor, for a utility network, etcetera.
At the same time, we're seeing over 70% of industrial
organizations were victims of cyber attacks.
Just in the last year, one in four organizations had to shut
down their operations for a small amount of time.
Anon there is a convergence between OT and IT systems.
What's going on there? As OT environments are getting
more and more digitized, the IT and OT environments are
converging so that you can have consistent visibility across the
entire infrastructure. At the same time, you're seeing
over 3/4 of all threats on OT networks originated from the IT
side and then percolated on to the OT environments.
You can have these two disjoint environments operate in silos
forever. They're converging.
Digitization is being all these things together.
You want to have a consistent architecture across IT and OT
with all the controls you want which are unique to OT.
Now digitization is amazing thing.
It brings new opportunities, new capabilities for these factory
floors, for these manufacturing facilities, but also brings in
an increase attack surface. How does this increase the
attack surface as you just mentioned?
As you get more and more digitized, as more and more
things get connected, the attack surface increases.
In the past, these organizations were completely air gap or not
connected to the outside world. As these are getting connected
now, what's happening is that the attack surface increases.
Also these systems or the organizations have very legacy
and complex systems, flat layer to networks.
Their assets have not been patched periodically.
They are very old assets. The variety of different systems
and stacks that have been used from last 123 decades at times.
So modernization was not possible.
Patching of these assets is not happening very frequently and
now people are exploiting as these get connected.
Can you give us some examples of exposed OT critical
infrastructure that's therefore open to attack?
Over 3/4 of these attacks the originate from the IT side.
So you have infiltrated into your IT systems and then you're
going into your OT environments. And these could be things like
remote code execution, command and control attacks, software
exploits happening on specific old systems.
A variety of different attacks are happening now.
Not all attacks of course are happening from IT and going to
OT. There are attacks are happening
on OT alone, but a large majority of them are are
initially happening on the IT side and then they are going to
move on to the OT environments. OT systems do have unique
attributes as you were describing.
What about traditional conventional approaches to
security, firewalls and so forth?
Securing the OT environments is a top, top priority.
Most of the customers I talk to in the OT environments, whether
the customers are manufacturing in utility, in oil and gas, in
food production, etcetera, recognize the problem.
They understand it's not easy because they have these legacy
environments. They're complex, they're flat
layered to environments. Some of them are getting
connected and the connectivity varies.
Some are getting connected a traditional way, some are
getting connected directly over 5G bespoke.
You want to give access to these factory flows and assets from
outside. You want to ensure that you're
giving them the least privileged access and they can only do what
you what you want them to do. So all those environments are
unique for OT environments. Now, the way to go about this
holistically is on the principles of 0 trust security.
There's power through AI visibility.
If you think of visibility, it's not about manually understanding
what your assets are in the environment.
It's next to impossible to do that because you have new
assets. I want to be able to understand
through machine learning, what's the device, what's the type,
what's the make, what's the model?
What is it talking to? What is it not doing?
What is supposed to do so I can baseline those things.
Second, your rules for segmentation or or should also
be machine learning power or AI, AI powered because these rules
will may change and you have new devices coming on, which devices
have access to which group? What's the policies you set for
them? They cannot be done manually.
Look, majority of breaches happen when things are
configured manually. Once you do that, the third is
that how do you secure all of the connections outside and
coming from the outside world? That only happens to the power
of what I call as precision AIA combination of machine learning,
deep learning infused with large language models.
Because the traditional approaches of security which are
based on a signature or a database is not sufficient.
Attackers are more and more sophisticated, so you cannot
rely only on that. The only way to solve problems
for the new world will be AI driven through your machine
learning and deep learning models.
You mentioned precision AI to support security on OT devices
and environments. Can you elaborate on that?
So if you think of a signature, it's like, you know, I had a
given device or a person infected with a given threat.
I understand what it is. I built a signature and then I
give a content update on my network enforcement point so
that nobody else is affected by the same threat that the first
person was. In my view, that's reactive.
It used to take us seven days to give a content, then 24 hours
and 8 hours, and sometimes it's now it's in a matter of minutes,
but it's still reactive. If you want to stop new threats,
threats that that you've seen before, but also threats that
you've never seen before, what I call as day 0 threats, then you
need to not depend only on the signature and databases.
You got to look at things in line in real time.
That happens with deep learning across both structure and
unstructured data. We were able to understand
what's going on and protect you from threats that you've never
seen before. And that's the power of
precision AI, where we taking what we did with machine
learning, we added these deep learning models and we'll infuse
that in the last two years with all the variation that we can
get with large language models. So combination of these three
techniques is what we call precision AI.
And of course, you're dealing with threat actors who have
become very sophisticated in the use of AI and machine learning
on their side as well. Cyber security is the only
industry that has an active adversary.
Our job is to be right every single time.
The attacker's job is to be right once.
And the amount of effort that we put into researching all of
these various threats, models, new techniques in AI is to
always stay ahead of the adversary and that's what we do
with position AI. We are now stopping at Palo Alto
Networks over 12 billion attacks every single day, and two and a
half million of those are net new attacks that nobody has ever
seen before. That's only possible because we
have 4400 machine learning deep learning models running on the
platform that is looking at these things in line in real
time, protecting you from threats that you've seen in the
past and threats that you've never seen before.
Now, many of these OT systems are in legacy environments.
They're not patched, they're a whole host of issues.
How do you manage that? You need to have something where
you can do what I call virtual patching where you can.
You can build signatures of what you want, what is happening on
the endpoints and block them on the network side because they're
easier to patch it centrally because it's hard to update
these devices periodically and in some cases it's not possible.
Why is virtual patching so important?
See Virtual Patching helps us now solve the problem where I'm
not able to patch my endpoints with vulnerability and CVS that
I see, but I'm having a network solution to to still make sure
that I'm not affected by that situation.
So I'm I'm basically solving it more creatively.
These environments are mission critical and very often must run
continuously. How can organizations integrate
these kinds of solutions without causing disruption to their
environment? If you're using OT, stick it in
a factory floor. You can't stop production in a
factory floor. If you're using in a utility or
oil and gas environment, you can't stop what's happening with
your utility and your oil and gas environment.
So it's very important that you build your OT solutions keeping
in mind high availability, keeping in mind how do you
ensure that from an operational perspective they continue to
run. Remote access is critical for
these kinds of environments. How do you enable remote access
while providing security? Over 50% of organizations today,
Michael, are having technicians, contractors or employees access
these high value critical assets remotely.
And for that, you want to make sure that a, you're using the
right privileges for what they have access to.
When they get access to the system.
They are accessed ideally from a secure enterprise browser where
you can do just in time recording, you can look at the
activity, you can log all things that they are doing because
these are very critical assets. So you want to make sure that
you are designing the solutions with least privilege of what the
contractor, the employee, the technician accesses.
But also ensure that you have a full ordered log of every single
activity done by the user. Anon, you've mentioned zero
trust several times. How does that come into play in
this remote access scenario? It is one of the most abuse
words in cybersecurity. You think of 0 trust.
It means no notion of implied trust.
So I want to understand in this case who the device or the asset
is. Is this something that I
understand and it's assigned to my OT environment?
Then you want to know who is this asset talking to, talking
to systems inside the organization and talking to
things in the outside world? Who can access these systems
from the outside for the example we talked about for remote
access? And when you allow this
connection, how do you ensure that this connection, whether it
is from the asset to the outside world or the reverse is
monitored for all threats, vulnerabilities, command control
connections and so on, so forth? And four, how do you manage the
entire life cycle of this assets?
All this in construct helps us define zero trust for OT
environments where we have no notion implied trust, we have
least privilege access and I'm monitoring every single
connection and flow from the asset or to the asset.
I know in factory floors and other OT environments are very
harsh. There's humidity issues, there's
temperature. How do you handle that aspect?
They are harsh environments. Sometimes these environments
have vibration temperature control and you think of other
OT environments, they could be outdoor Michael, like like your
utility, your mining, your oil and gas which could have you
know have to operate in temperatures which are very hot
or really, really cold. So for those environments we
have what we call ruggedized firewalls.
These are network enforcement points which have all of the all
of the ability to wither all the harsh environments, whether it's
temperature, whether it is rain, whether it is vibration, whether
it is sand and so on and so forth.
And these are enforcement points.
These are enforcement point, or these are sensors on the network
that help identify who the devices are on the environment,
but also help protect from threats, command control
connections, software exploits, so on and so forth.
And on the regulations around cybersecurity reporting are
evolving. Can you tell us about that?
What's going on there? Within 72 hours if you are
having a attack you got to have you have to report that.
For ransomware you have 24 hours to report that.
So these are environment that are happening and this is quite
broad. It affects large sector of
organizations, including OT environments and that is what
the rules and regulations are. The best thing that we are
advising our customers is that make sure that you're building
these systems which are highly secure so that you have the
capability then to protect yourself from these threats.
Do you have advice on how organizations can maintain
operational efficiency while maintaining compliance with
these new regulations? Most of these environments are
highly regulated. Most of these environments have
to do have a lot of things around audits and trails and
logs and a lot of time is spent including this audit log
reports. What we do with our solution of
OT security in addition to the things I talked about which is
visibility, segmentation and policy control, zero trust
access and security on an ongoing basis, we also help them
automate all the audit information because now we have
full visibility into every individual asset in the
organization. We know the make the model, the
version, the vulnerabilities associated with it and we can
now automate so as report creation from audit perspective
and help them be more proactive in how you remediate form these
vulnerabilities either by patching the endpoints, by
having solutions like guided virtual patching or support on
the network enforcement point for security threats.
So given the complexity around these OT environments and the
ever evolving nature of security threats, automation is the key.
Automation and your security and your visibility needs to be
powered by AI. You cannot do these things
manually. AI and machine learning have
been core themes you've touched on during our discussion.
Why is it so important in these converged OTIT environments?
We're talking of OT environments and IT enviros merging.
You're talking of two systems coming together.
We're talking of complexity, of variety of different things on
the OT environment, many of them that can't be patched, many of
them having vulnerabilities. And then you have to have all
the segmentation rules and policies.
All of this has to be powered through AI and machine learning.
You got to be able to have full visibility.
You got to do it on structure unstructured data.
You got to have your segmentation rules and policies
automatically created. But now as these assets get
connected, you have to use the power of machine learning, deep
learning, LLMS, what we call precision AI to secure every
single connection across every single possible threat vector
with this command control connections and software
exploits and phishing attacks or malware or OT specific threats.
All of this needs to be done to the power of AI so you can stop
and prevent both known as well as unknown threats in real time,
reducing any of the downtime of the assets and have full life
cycle manageability across the entire life cycle of the OT
assets for the factory floor of the plant.
Anon, great talking with you. Thank you so much.
Michael, always a pleasure. Thank you so much.