Palo Alto Networks on Wednesday unveiled a rugged firewall for industrial environments, and announced several new features available through its Industrial OT Security offering.

The new ruggedized next-generation firewall (NGFW) for harsh industrial environments is the PA-450R. The new product, recommended for operational technology (OT) environments such as power substations, leverages machine learning to block threats and Palo Alto Networks says it delivers three times more performance compared to previous generation firewalls.

The PA-450R natively integrates with the company’s Industrial OT Security offering, providing visibility, security, trust verification and threat prevention through one platform. 

The company also announced that the Industrial OT Security offering now provides asset identification and risk visibility capabilities for cellular-connected devices that use 5G. 3G- and 4G-connected devices are also supported.

“Working seamlessly within the Palo Alto Networks NGFW, this solution offers customers the ability to correlate mobile-specific contexts, including IMEI and IMSI, with high-fidelity device identification, such as device type, vendor make, model, operating system and risk and behavior analytics. We’ve also enhanced the Industrial OT Security’s device database by incorporating an additional 220,000 device types, sourced from the GSMA database,” Palo Alto Networks explained.

The new capability enables organizations to quickly detect, for example, potentially malicious communication between a mobile device and an application that may be unauthorized.

The cybersecurity giant also announced a risk priority classification feature designed to evaluate threat likelihood indicators and the impact to a customer’s environment. The feature leverages data such as CVSS score, threat insights from CISA’s KEV catalog, and the exploit prediction scoring system (EPSS).

For organizations using software-defined wide area network (SD-WAN) technology, Palo Alto Networks announced that its Prisma SD-WAN on-premises controller can be used in their OT environments, enabling customers to safely identify and profile devices using industrial protocols like Modbus, Siemens S7, and EtherNet/IP.

In addition, the recently announced Strata Cloud Manager (SCM) operations management solution features a dedicated OT security dashboard for quick access to OT risks and alerts.

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