NexDefense, a leading provider of cybersecurity for industrial control systems (ICS), said it entered into a collaborative agreement with General Dynamics Commercial Cyber Services, a unit of General Dynamics Information Technology.
Under the terms of the agreement, General Dynamics Commercial Cyber Services will expand its portfolio of cybersecurity services to include monitoring of ICS networks utilizing NexDefense’s Sophia™, an award winning industrial network security monitoring and anomaly detection system. For General Dynamics Commercial Cyber Services, the collaborative agreement will expand its advanced cyber security monitoring service to deliver cyber monitoring for ICS.
NexDefense is a member company in the Advanced Technology Development Center’s ATDC Signature portfolio of startups. Those companies in ATDC Signature receive intense mentoring and access to resources from the incubator and are most ready to thrive as standalone enterprises once they graduate out of the program.
“Critical infrastructure worldwide face unprecedented threats from sophisticated and well-funded threat actors with various financial, repetitional, and physical motivations,” said Doug Wylie, vice president of product strategy at NexDefense. “Our collaborative agreement with General Dynamics Commercial Cyber Services not only validates our ICS security system, but also helps the company’s critical infrastructure clients reduce risk without any interference to normal operations.”
The announcement coincides with General Dynamics Commercial Cyber Services’ launch of an ICS cyber monitoring initiative. The company selected NexDefense as its collaborator because of its industry leading technology, Sophia™, which is the result of extensive collaboration between NexDefense, the United States Department of Energy, Battelle Energy Alliance, and the cybersecurity experts of Idaho National Laboratory (INL). Since obtaining the rights to commercialize Sophia, NexDefense has added significant upgrades important to all sectors of ICS, including asset identification, deep packet inspection for industrial protocols and enhanced visualization features.
“The conversion of IT and OT technologies, as well as the proliferation of mass connectivity, has created complex vulnerabilities to ICS networks,” said David Ross, general manager of General Dynamics Commercial Cyber Services. “To help mitigate these risks, we’ve chosen NexDefense’s, Sophia™ as the technology to enable us to monitor ICS and provide the security that is needed.”
Founded in 2012, NexDefense helps organizations across critical infrastructure sectors to identify threats, reduce risks and better maintain the availability, integrity and confidentiality of all essential operations. Sophia™, its patent-pending Industrial Network Anomaly Detection (INAD) system, is a cybersecurity solution purpose-built for control systems to enhance protection while also facilitating compliance to standards and best practices. Sophia is designed to understand ICS protocols and provide real-time insight into systems to give organizations visibility and access to the data they need to know to make real-time decisions to better protect critical infrastructure from cyber attacks.