The company put its trust in FL mGuard industrial firewall/router modules from Phoenix Contact and Innominate. The positive experience gained from this project and the knowledge acquired of the systems also proved highly beneficial during the network protection operations. The system network had already been successfully planned and put into operation in conjunction with Phoenix Contact, the automation specialist based in the German town of Blomberg. The production related IT department ultimately assumed responsibility for addressing the planning, installation, commissioning, and administration tasks. The central IT department was also involved in the preliminary discussions regarding implementing the new structure, the technical evaluation, and start-up monitoring. Given the typical distances between network nodes at industrial plants this proves particularly expensive and inefficient which is why these environments are virtually dominated by tree shaped and linear cable topologies and therefore better suited to a distributed firewall approach. For central protection featuring comparable granularity all systems and sub-networks would need star layout network cabling with a high capacity firewall in a complex configuration.
The distributed industrial firewall/router solution segments the production network in the car body construction plant at Emden into 15 isolated subnetworks. When it came to selecting suitable hardening and security measures Volkswagen AG’s Emden plant opted for industrial routers with an integrated firewall. Such permanent requests can disrupt or even crash an industrial controller.”Īn action item matrix was developed based on the risk assessment, encompassing organisational changes, network segmentation, and the introduction of distributed industrial firewalls. Jens Hoofdmann, bodywork maintenance specialist, cited one problematic issue arising from the analysis, “A typical example is the installation of a server which subsequently sends ping packets to the entire network at short intervals.
Unintentional misentries were also identified as problematic weaknesses.
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The result – sensitive production systems were insufficiently protected against unauthorised access because attacks can be triggered by malware, inadvertent access or unintentional misentries during internal network operations and their prevention by centralised firewalls is very complex and not cost effective.Įmployees of third party companies who access the network using their laptops during service operations or for hardware and software installations and can unintentionally spread malware are deemed to pose a potential risk, for example. The other side of the coin is an increased risk of malfunctions and production interruptions due to security loopholes in industrial networks.įor this reason, an internal risk analysis was conducted at Volkswagen AG’s Emden car body production plant and the security of the systems was scrutinised, including their control technology. Easy integration into intranet and internet, the high bandwidth of up to Gigabits per second and decreasing costs of industrially specified cables, connectors, switches, and routers are the reasons behind this development. Thanks to the segmentation of the network, the installation of industrial firewalls, and stricter access rules, the systems are now protected against unauthorised access.Įthernet-based production systems are becoming increasingly well established. Following risk analysis, Volkswagen AG has introduced a new security standard for its car bodywork production network at its plant in Emden, Germany.
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