Bayshore unveils OpShield NextGeneration product line using GE Digital’s technology

Industrial control cybersecurity vendor Bayshore Networks combined GE Digital’s OpShield security technology with its own Deep Content Inspection and Advanced Policy Learning and Enforcement, leading to the creation of an integrated product line called ‘OpShield NextGeneration.’

The OpShield NextGeneration line will deliver industrial cybersecurity and active prevention/protection for industrial equipment, including programmable logic controllers (PLCs), human machine interface (HMIs), and engineering workstations. Bayshore will be the exclusive provider of the combined technology to global customers through GE Digital, Bayshore and other sales channels.

OpShield NextGeneration will support organizations across industries that need to protect operational technology (OT) environments, industrial processes and plant operations, Durham, North Carolina-based Bayshore said in a press statement. Growing demands to secure industrial and critical infrastructure networks led Bayshore to combine its technology with OpShield, it added.

OpShield NextGeneration can protect most HMI and supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) systems from unauthorized and potentially high-risk or dangerous network activity, such as unscheduled configuration changes, unscheduled maintenance events, indicators of reconnaissance and surveillance, denial of service (DoS) attacks, network spoofing and piggybacking.

Bayshore Networks will begin offering the current OpShield product line to customers later this quarter, with a planned launch of OpShield NextGeneration this year across PLC vendors with edge active protection. The company has raised a total of US$11.4 million in funding over three rounds. Benhamou Global Ventures and ForgePoint Capital are its most recent investors, according to Crunchbase data.

“The combination of Bayshore’s In-depth Policy Engine with GE Digital’s OpShield Management Console and Advanced Protocol technology addresses the fact that while companies may have threat analytics or detection solutions as part of a Cyber Security triad, they must have advanced prevention capabilities,” said Steve Pavlosky, GE Digital’s director for digital product management in the press statement.

“Industrial companies will now usually agree that they have hosts and applications which are no longer separated, or ‘air-gapped’ off for safe, isolated operations from the rest of the company or from outsiders and the internet.” said Sid Snitkin, vice president cybersecurity advisory services at ARC Advisory, a technology research and advisory firm for industry and infrastructure. “These types of systems are susceptible to certain OT network attacks. And with the influence of the pandemic, the industrial attack surface and the resulting cyber risk just continues to increase.”

Bayshore also identified in a recent report that new cyber security threats targeting IIoT in the pharmaceutical and chemical manufacturing sectors are emerging every day, risking public and employee safety, operational disruptions and plant downtime, and costly physical damage to plants, machines, and products, in addition to loss of intellectual property via espionage on the corporate network.

Anna Ribeiro

Industrial Cyber News Editor. Anna Ribeiro is a freelance journalist with over 14 years of experience in the areas of security, data storage, virtualization and IoT.