Darktrace partners with Siemens for cybersecurity in oil and gas industry

SAN FRANCISCO and HOUSTON -- Darktrace, the leader in Enterprise and Industrial Immune System technology, and Siemens, a global engineering and technology leader, have today announced they have entered into a strategic partnership to bring cutting-edge cyber defense for operational technology (OT) to electric utilities and the oil and gas industry. With Darktrace’s Industrial Immune System and Siemens’ extensive domain OT security expertise, the partnership will enable customers to enhance their agility in detecting and responding to cyber-attacks.

As these sectors become increasingly digital to achieve revenue and efficiency gains, there is a corresponding need to identify cyber-threats at their earliest stages – going beyond compliance regulations to secure operations. Utilities and oil and gas organizations must defend their entire networks, including all OT, against persistent and highly sophisticated cyber-threats without disrupting business processes. In the oil and gas industry, for instance, digitalization brings a convergence of IT and OT with critical data travelling from the field, to the control room, to the enterprise network.

Leveraging advances in machine learning and probabilistic mathematics, Darktrace’s Industrial Immune System platform can detect and remediate in-progress cyber-threats at their nascent stages. By learning the ‘pattern of life’ for every network, device, and user across both OT and IT networks, the AI algorithms can identify and automatically take action against emerging attacks that other tools consistently miss, all in real time.

As an industrial technology provider for more than 165 years, Siemens has an inherent and holistic understanding of how to manage cyber risk in complex operating environments. A leader in the OT industry, Siemens brings to the partnership deep domain know-how and solutions for OT cyber, including security program design, security lifecycle management, plant security monitoring, and incident response.

“As energy infrastructure becomes increasingly data-driven, it is critical for operators to quickly detect and disrupt cyber-threats,” commented Aymeric Sarrazin, senior V.P., controls and digitalization at Siemens Power Generation Services. “Through this strategic collaboration, Siemens and Darktrace will give customers actionable insights and intelligence to be faster in identifying and neutralizing those threats, protecting critical assets from harmful and costly attacks.”

“As OT environments become more digital, they open a new and glaring vulnerability in organizations of all sizes,” commented Nicole Eagan, CEO, Darktrace. “With over 2,400 deployments to date, Darktrace’s immune system technology is uniquely capable of not only identifying in-progress threats, but also neutralizing them. We are pleased to be partnering with Siemens to fast-track the delivery of our globally recognized Industrial Immune System to additional customers in utilities and the oil and gas industry. This new era of cyber warfare has resulted in an increased demand for our machine learning technology, which is uniquely capable of providing automated security to environments that extend beyond the corporate network.”