Fortinet extends security fabric to IIoT

Fortinet has extended its FortiGuard threat intelligence service to the industrial IoT (IIoT).

The new FortiGuard Industrial Security Service (ISS) builds on the threat intelligence services of FortiGuard Labs by providing application control and defensive signatures specific to critical infrastructure and industrial sector organizations.

The company is particularly targeting the utility, oil and gas, transportation, and manufacturing sectors.

FortiGuard ISS protects the most widely-used industrial control system (ICS) and supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) devices and applications. The service provides vulnerability protection, visibility and granular control over ICS and SCADA systems and is backed by real-time threat intelligence updates.

Enterprise and consumer demand has created an explosion in the number of IoT devices connecting to global networks. McKinsey estimates that 20 to 30 billion IoT devices could be connected globally by 2020, up from 10 billion to 15 billion devices in 2015. However, as devices proliferate, security risks also increase.

Traditionally, commercial and industrial networks and their IoT devices have operated in isolation, but the mainstreaming of things like smart cities and connected homes have begun to merge these devices within local, national and global infrastructures.

This is requiring organizations to rethink how they secure increasingly converged IT, OT and IoT networks and devices. Integrating distinct security tools into a unified Security Fabric enables organizations to collect and correlate threat intelligence in real time, identify abnormal behavior and automatically orchestrate a response anywhere across this complex IoT attack surface.