Security of Industrial Switch Is No Small Matter

With the development of technological innovations such as big data, artificial intelligence, and 5G, industrial production processes have become more digitized, automated, intelligent, and networked, and Industrial Switches have become more and more widely used.But with it, network attacks are increasingly turning to critical civil infrastructure such as electricity, water conservancy, telecommunications, and national industrial control systems.

An attack on an industrial control system may not only lead to downtime, but also lead to security incidents, and even affect normal public services, causing immeasurable losses to the society. Moreover, the industrial control system carries important industrial data related to enterprise production, social economy and even national security. Once it is stolen, tampered with or flows abroad, it will pose a serious threat to national security. Factories, refineries, ports and other industrial organizations that deploy industrial Ethernet switches are more vulnerable to cyberattacks by hackers, according to a new study. Some of these vulnerabilities exist that could allow individuals malicious access to the network and take control of an entire organization's network, causing fatal damage to industrial facilities.

The network equipment in these industrial organizations is rarely maintained in daily use. Under the potential threat of network attacks, once hacked, it will cause catastrophic losses. These vulnerabilities include "the default password is used in the background", "the firmware update is not timely" and so on. Network devices that seem to be "safe" on weekdays are actually very easy to be broken by hackers. These potential security holes are not a problem for hackers, and the system will be paralyzed soon after being attacked.

Using these high-risk vulnerabilities, attackers can remotely steal sensitive information such as industrial control instructions, account passwords, etc. transmitted over the network, or launch man-in-the-middle attacks, making the entire network appear to be streaking. At the same time, hackers can directly issue various instructions to stop, destroy, open, close, etc. to the networked industrial control equipment, and even implant a Trojan virus in the network to directly shut down the production equipment in the network.

To this end, as a professional industrial switch manufacturer, Houshi Network Technology gives full play to its own security strength and gives industrial switches the ability of "self-security", so that industrial switches also have security identification capabilities at the front end. Through in-depth research on the propagation principles of various network viruses, Houshi Network Technology integrates the network propagation behaviors of various viruses to form an intelligent analysis module and is built into the switch algorithm. The key packets are extracted and transferred to the CPU for modeling and matching, that is, the forwarding and analysis planes are separated, and normal network forwarding is not affected by the security function of the self-secure switch, which satisfies the dual requirements of fast forwarding and secure identification of network access.

Therefore, similar to the "ransomware virus", Houshi Network Technology can completely prevent its spread at the access layer through self-secure industrial switches. However, it is a long and arduous process to completely solve the security problem of industrial switches. Especially in the company and the most basic network equipment, security personnel recommend that a complete security check should be carried out. In particular, the technical professional switch operators should strictly follow the operation guide to apply the terminal equipment, start with the mobile phone software equipment of the system software or check on the system to prevent the implementation of incorrect instructions in daily work. Strictly check whether the I/O equipment is in a normal state, especially when checking the floppy disk drive, immediately change the incorrect data information.

On the road of future development, Houshi will develop more advanced industrial switches, and iteratively update them continuously. The future can be expected to ensure industrial safety. We will walk with you all the way!