NERC compliance with BOUNCER by CoreTrace
SCADA and DCS systems are critical to the safety of national power grids, petrochemical facilities, and commuter and freight transit. These critical points of control must be forcefully protected at all times (See Hardening Critical Systems at Electrical Utilities, by NetSpi).
That's why the North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC) was formed in 1968 — to promote the reliability and adequacy of bulk power in the United States. A big part of that mandate is the security of the many systems large and small that make up the bulk of utility delivery. Penalties for non-compliance can be severe, with fines of up to $1 million per violation per day, complete with public posting of the violation. NERC Requirement Mapping is quite specific:
Engineering and utility SCADA systems most often run on general-purpose operating systems that are far more vulnerable than the proprietary operating systems of old. BOUNCER by CoreTrace is an endpoint control and security solution designed to protect the configuration and integrity of critical systems. Residing in the operating system kernel makes BOUNCER the most tamper-proof solution available.
BOUNCER allows a SCADA system to be quickly scanned, and an automatically generated policy can be applied to lock the applications, data configuration files, or both. Importantly, for SCADA systems, the entire process never requires the endpoint to reboot. There's no need to sacrifice availability for security.
Once in place, the BOUNCER application whitelisting technology helps meet NERC compliance as the approved configuration cannot be changed, not even by a user with Local Administrator privileges on the system. Changes can only be effected through the BOUNCER console.