Oiltanking has dramatically expanded over the years. 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.

The deployment was carried out by Axians and Actemium. Axians has a wide expertise in IT networks and cyberdefense technologies. Actemium is an expert in OT infrastructures and processes. Together they offer the ideal skill set: understanding industrial assets and information flows, identifying vulnerabilities and recommending architecture changes.
They installed Sentryo Sensor7 probes on Oiltanking’s infrastructure to collect network traffic. The Sensor7’s unique Deep Packet Inspection algorithms could 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 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. Oiltanking very quickly had a precise view of their existing ICS infrastructure and a clear understanding of the cyber risks they were facing. Sentryo’s ICS CyberVision gave Oiltanking precise information to take immediate sanitary measures to secure its OT infrastructure. It also gave Axians and Actemium a factual basis to build their report and suggest midterm security improvements and items to be included in the roadmap. Having a clear understanding of the existing industrial network helped every stakeholder discuss about the desired target infrastructure and network segmentation. Oiltanking’s ICS managers could now build change specifications and work efficiently with their IT department responsible for technical domain management. "We operate a very large site so it is quite difficult to track every industrial asset manually. We have been very impressed by Sentryo’s ability to quickly build a map describing our infrastructure and network flows. It immediately identified vulnerabilities so we could take actions right away. 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", said Herman Van Loo, Maintenance Supervisor.