Dragos expanding OT security platform, acquiring NetRise and runZero

OT cybersecurity company Dragos has announced it has officially acquired NetRise and runZero. The acquisitions follow the close of Accenture’s majority investment in Dragos, which is providing the capital to accelerate the company’s growth.

Earlier this year, Dragos acquired Phosphorus to help protect connected devices embedded across critical infrastructure and other operational networks. The company says that acquiring runZero will extend Dragos’s asset visibility and exposure management, pulling in existing IT, OT and cloud asset data from sources organisations already have, so defenders can see everything in their xOT environment. The acquisition of NetRise adds visibility into the firmware and software running on those devices, surfacing risks like outdated components and hardcoded credentials, and supporting the documentation organisations need for compliance with NERC CIP, NIS2, TSA directives and other requirements.

“The world’s largest companies have invested heavily in enterprise IT security, yet it’s their cyber-physical systems that generate revenue and carry national and local security impact,” said Robert M. Lee, Chairman and CEO of Dragos. “Organisations across electricity, oil and gas, manufacturing, data centres, and other critical infrastructure sectors need to defend every system that can influence a physical process.”

According to Gartner, “the bidirectional cyber-physical continuum is facing a significantly expanded attack surface as CPS (cyber-physical systems) increasingly interconnect with each other, with enterprise systems and externally via internet and wireless connectivity. This effectively dismantles the legacy assumption of air-gapped isolation, which is no longer defensible in today’s operational environments.”

The acquisitions will also expand the Dragos Intelligence Fabric, the OT-specific telemetry and incident response technology that powers the Dragos Platform. Dragos EmberAI, built specifically for operational environments, will draw on that expanded data set to give analysts using the Dragos Platform even faster and richer guidance, according to the company.

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