A worldwide network of tank terminals

Customer: Oiltanking
Expertise & industry: Cybersecurity
Technology: Sentryo Sensor7, networking roadmap, Sentryo ICS CyberVision

Oiltanking is one of the largest independent operators of tank terminals for oils, chemicals and gases worldwide. Their clients include private and state oil companies, refiners, petrochemical companies, and traders in petroleum products and chemicals. The company owns and operates 76 terminals in 25 countries with a total storage capacity of 20 million cbm, on five continents.

Over the years, Oiltanking has expanded dramatically. They have deployed many new storage tanks with many different types of control systems. Each were installed by various contractors. Increased awareness about the consequences of a cyber-attack led Oiltanking to realize they didn’t really know how secured their industrial systems were. They asked for a network security assessment to be done to understand their exposure to a potential cyber event.

Securing the tanks

The deployment was carried out by Axians and our sister company Actemium. Together we offer the ideal skill set: understanding industrial assets and information flows, identifying vulnerabilities and recommending architecture changes.

We installed Sentryo Sensor7 probes on Oiltanking’s infrastructure to collect network traffic. The Sensor7’s algorithms extract meaningful information on each asset: vendor references, hardware and firmware version, installed programs and modules, messages sent and received, etc. All this data was automatically sent to Sentryo’s ICS (Industrial Control Systems) CyberVision platform which leverages artificial intelligence to build a map of all industrial components and their relationships. It also correlates this information with Threat Intelligence feeds to highlight vulnerabilities.

“We operate a very large site, so it’s quite difficult to track every industrial asset manually. Actemium and Axians did a great job helping us understand how to improve security on the long term. We now have a roadmap to work with our IT department.”

Herman Van Loo, Maintenance Supervisor at Oiltanking

Sentryo ICS CyberVision gave Oiltanking precise information to take immediate sanitary measures to secure its OT infrastructure. It also gave us a factual basis to build their report and suggest mid-term security improvements and items to be included in the roadmap.

Oiltanking very quickly had a precise view of their existing ICS infrastructure and a clear understanding of the cyber risks they were facing.