With the recent increase in, and awareness of cybersecurity attacks on industry, companies are starting to understand the devastating production and financial losses these attacks are capable of.  Industrial networks are often full of legacy hardware that was never envisaged to be connected to the internet.  This has led to the rise in targeted attacks on these networks and the need to implement security mechanisms to avoid exploitation and compromise.

The IEC-62443 standard was developed to assist with providing a guide to work towards securing these networks.  Basic, medium and high security levels within the standard denote increasing levels of security policy adoption.  A basic level includes items such as default password changes, account timeouts and enabling trusted access to the device.  A high level of adoption may include device configuration file encryption.

Adoption of any level of IEC-62443 is optional and dependent upon a risk assessment of the network.  While not a guarantee of threat immunity, it does serve as an excellent and agreed upon starting point.

To assist with adoption of the highest level of IEC-62443 conformity, Moxa have their “E” series managed switch range.  These easy to install and configure switches allow the user to implement the highest level of the IEC-62443 standard.  Not limiting itself to just switches, Moxa has a wide range of compliant devices, including serial to Ethernet servers, protocol gateways, firewalls and wireless access hardware that are all IEC-62443 aware.

Obtaining an understanding of how secure your network is may seem like a difficult and longwinded process until you discover MxView 2.0 from Moxa. MxView is Moxa’s answer to a Network Management System (NMS) and while it will effortlessly discover all Moxa and non-Moxa hardware on your network, automatically draw a topology map and provide an excellent overview of your network, it can do a lot, lot more. The latest version will provide you with a colour coded visual of how secure your network connected device is.  Four colour codes relate directly to the IEC-62443 standard (Open, Basic, Medium, High). MxView allows you to centrally view security events as well as provide the ability to mass configure settings from a central location. Being able to deploy changes and updates of settings relating to the IEC standard ensures a uniform deployment across the network. The MxView software suite is licensed based on the number of network connected devices you wish to monitor.  This makes it an extremely cost effective network monitoring tool with the added benefit of the security awareness monitoring, link bandwidth monitoring and centralised administration of your network.