Industrial Traffic Collection: Understanding the implications of Deploying visibility without impacting production

Due to the critical nature of industrial environments and the lifetime of deployed assets, many organizations do not have complete knowledge of what assets are operating in the environment and what communications are involved. With the continuous move to IP based communications for controls equipment, Cybersecurity continues to increase in importance and is a priority for many executives. Industrial controls are unique because they are interfacing with the real world, which has implications on human safety and the ability of an organization to maintain operations. Unfortunately, the criticality of these devices and the lack of robust network functions on many often requires the use of passive solutions to gather information. This paper will focus on outlining the potential impact of collecting network traffic, discussing the functions available on networking equipment to enable it, identifying possible deployment architectures and the pros and cons of each, and explaining a methodology to calculate the potential impacts.