SANS Institute presents Invensys with 2006 Process Control Security Leadership award

SANS Institute presents Invensys with 2006 Process Control Security Leadership award

Group recognizes Invensys practices for facilitating user security procedures and protecting process infrastructure owners’ critical assets

At its recent Security Summit, the SANS Institute presented Invensys Process Systems (www.invensys.com/ps) the 2006 Process Control Security Leadership Award. The award recognizes organizations that are difference-makers in cyber-security for critical enterprise infrastructures.

The SANS citation declared that Invensys has demonstrated that vendors can take much of the pain, cost, and uncertainty out of securing process and SCADA systems. The award identified some Invensys practices, including rigorous pre-testing of operating system updates and software security patches, and additional enhancements such as providing anti-virus within its core distributed control system (DCS) product, that make security better, easier and less expensive for asset owners. These factors, according to SANS, can make the difference between asset owners “betting their system reliability” on security issues, and being able to operate with confidence that security measures have been built in to their control systems.

According to Ernest Rakaczky, program director of process control network security at Invensys Process Systems, vendors need to work closely with enterprise and process asset owners to secure the infrastructure. “We as vendors are controlling major plants,” he said. “That becomes a lifetime arrangement. This means that our security procedures and practices are intertwined with the business operations of our customers.”

About SANS Institute

The Systems Administration, Audit, Network, Security Institute (SANS) is the most trusted and largest source for information security training and certification in the world. More than 54,000 SANS alumni in 43 countries are responsible for all aspects of information security in military and civilian government agencies, in industry and in academia. Established in 1989 as a cooperative research and education organization, SANS Institute programs now reach more than 165,000 security professionals, auditors, system administrators, network administrators, chief information security officers, and CIOs.

SANS (www.sans.org) also maintains an open library of more than 1,500 unique research documents on 75 aspects of information security, publishes the definitive weekly, quarterly and annual updates of the most critical Internet security vulnerabilities, and operates the Internet's early warning system -- Internet Storm Center. SANS faculty are active participants in U.S. cyber-security policy debates and have been invited to testify before both the U.S. House of Representatives and US Senate.