As 2021 draws to a close, it is time for our customary round-up of the year’s industry-changing cyber attacks, product and company updates, and SCADAfence’s achievements.
A Landmark Year for SCADAfence
Before we get into the year’s industry and product news, 2021 has been an astonishing year for us at SCADAfence. To start off the year, we unveiled our strategic partnership with Rapid7 which was followed up with many partnerships with industry leaders such as Keysight Technologies, BDO, Fujitsu, NCC and others. Then came recognition from SC media naming SCADAfence the Best SCADA Security Solution for 2021 and Frost & Sullivan announcing SCADAfence as a leader in the Frost Radar for Critical Infrastructure Cyber Security Market report for 2021. On that note, we want to thank all our employees, customers, partners, distributors, investors, for helping us reach new milestones we couldn't have dreamed of.
OT Security in the Spotlight
2021 started out with the entire security community recovering from the aftermath of the massive SolarWinds campaign. Just a few weeks later news broke that a water treatment plant in Oldsmar, Florida, was under attack but the security team quickly thwarted the attack. The attacker briefly pumped up sodium hydroxide, the main ingredient in liquid drain cleaners, from 100 parts per million to 11,100 parts per million into the water supply. That control was undone almost immediately and the public was never at risk in this case, but it’s a quick lesson at just how important OT security is in 2021 and beyond.
Over the next six months, the OT security industry was reminded that 2021 was the year of OT ransomware. Some of the ransomware attacks were so colossal, they grabbed national headlines for the impact they had on civilians’ daily lives. In early May, a ransomware attack on Colonial Pipeline,a major East Coast fuel supplier presented the different security risks of exploiting IT networks to reach operational technology OT security infrastructures. Shortly after in June, meat producer JBS USA paid an $11 million ransom after attackers shut down operations at five of their beef-processing plants.
And now suddenly, it’s been a crazy year of attacks that have affected the OT security landscape but just two weeks ago we have moved onto another threat that could last for years. There’s really no way to predict where threat actors will head in 2022, but we expect to still see more attacks on critical infrastructure via ransomware to be on the rise.
Major SCADAfence Product Updates
With SCADAfence product, R&D teams, and security researchers working tirelessly, SCADAfence development saw several milestones. Perhaps most importantly, enhancing our Governance Portal with a complete UI facelift that offers faster and more advanced results and more coverage of compliance regulations. Today, our Governance Portal has become a significant contributor to the company’s revenue growth, which was driven by customer and market demand and the cybersecurity executive order by United States President Joe Biden.
SCADAfence’s Multi-Site portal also saw a major update, customers now can distribute their configurations to all their sites from the Multi-Site Portal to the distributed SCADAfence Platforms. The security configuration is managed via profiles and covers many security aspects including alerts policy, IP groups, central licensing, 3rd Party tools integrations, and more. By deploying the central configuration, administrators will now save more time while increasing productivity and efficiency while using the SCADAfence Platform in their multiple sites.
An additional product offering that we launched near the end of 2021 was SCADAfence’s Managed Services for OT security. Now industrial organizations can enable their OT security with minimal effort to simplify cybersecurity. Our OT security experts deliver the expertise and technology that is needed to effectively control OT networks with visibility, risk management, and vulnerability detection.
And, as usual, there were many equally important additions, such as feature updates, new integrations, performance improvements, and more.
2021, A Banner Year for SCADAfence
With 2022 right around the corner, we can’t forget the trend-setting year that was 2021. Here at SCADAfence, 2021 was a fruitful year of growth and opportunity which included quadrupling our yearly revenue and doubling our customer base over the last year. We accelerated our expanding global customer base across a diverse set of industries – including manufacturing, water treatment, critical infrastructure, oil and gas, pharmaceuticals, chemicals, and building management systems (BMS).
As a company, we moved to a beautiful new office in Ramat Gan and we recruited several industry-leading OT security experts from leading cybersecurity organizations to grow our sales, sales engineering and strategy team. We’ll share some more on that in future posts.
To a More Secure Year Ahead
We hope this recap of 2021 at SCADAfence helps you to see the larger trends of OT security and what our product has to offer. Stay tuned for more blog, news articles and innovative product updates in the upcoming year that will continue to examine new and emerging OT cyber threat and security trends we should all focus on.
As we conclude, we’d like to thank all our customers, employees, partners, investors and everyone who supported us this year.
We couldn’t have done it without you, and look forward to continuing to collaborate with you!
Happy New Year!