Case Study: European Gas Infrastructure Company achieves continuous operational visibility and cyber threat protection with ForeScout's SilentDefense

European Gas Infrastructure Company Implements Network Monitoring to Benefit from Operational Visibility and Protection from Cyber Threats

A major European gas infrastructure operator needed continuous situational awareness and protection for a mixed environment of legacy OT and modern IT systems. The challenge was to identify ICS devices and proprietary protocol variants, analyze IT traffic for known and zero-day threats, establish baselines for normal operations across dynamic networks, and validate network and operational changes in real time to prevent impacts on national gas infrastructure.

Forescout’s SilentDefense proved the capability during an on-site proof of concept and was deployed to monitor HMI networks at storage sites and the gas distribution pipeline, covering more than 400 IT systems and thousands of RTUs. Daily monitoring uncovered two critical issues—mismatches between production and acceptance network blueprints that would have broken disaster recovery, and vendor-misconfigured RTUs reporting invalid SCADA values that threatened forecasting accuracy—allowing the operator to correct them before they affected operations.