Original press release published here.

HANOVER, Md. – December 6, 2023 – Dragos, Inc., the global leader in cybersecurity for operational technology (OT) environments, today announced the Dragos Community Defense Program to provide free OT cybersecurity software for small water, electric, and natural gas providers. Initially available in the United States, offerings include the award-winning Dragos Platform and Neighborhood Keeper.

Small utilities are critical infrastructure, but have limited resources to defend their systems from cyber threats. Protecting power and water systems has become more challenging than ever as global threat actors and ransomware groups target critical infrastructure with increasingly sophisticated cyber attacks. The Dragos Community Defense Program helps alleviate the strain and protect communities from potentially destructive industrial cyber attacks.

The Dragos Community Defense Program gives under-resourced US-based utility providers with under $100M in annual revenue access to Dragos products that provide a robust, multi-layered foundation for building and growing their OT cybersecurity programs, improving their security postures, and reducing OT cyber risk.

The Community Defense Program includes:

• Dragos Platform:

-Asset visibility and inventory, threat detection, vulnerability management, and threat hunting

• Neighborhood Keeper:

-Collective defense and community threat visibility among participating Dragos customers using aggregated data

• Access to Dragos Academy

-On-demand training and education for OT cyber and Dragos Platform use

• Membership in OT-CERT

“We look forward to bringing the Community Defense Program to the many small utilities that struggle to build OT cybersecurity programs due to a lack of resources and expertise,” said Robert M. Lee, Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder of Dragos, Inc. “Governments and large infrastructure providers are heavily investing in industrial cybersecurity, but small utilities that deliver critical services to the majority of people haven’t been able to do the same. They have been over-strained and under-resourced for far too long and the Community Defense Program aims to change that.”

The Dragos Community Defense Program was originally launched as a trial program in 2022 to help small utilities protect themselves in light of increasing global threats related to the invasion of Ukraine. Elastic has partnered with Dragos to provide Elasticsearch, its search analytics platform, to provide the scale needed to deliver the Dragos Platform as a free offering. Elasticsearch serves as the primary log storage and query engine within the platform, enabling Dragos analytic execution and providing Dragos Platform users with full-text search capabilities across months of stored security logs.

Dragos OT-CERT (OT-Cyber Emergency Readiness Team) will support participants in the Dragos Community Defense Program. OT-CERT offerings include free how-to guides and demonstration videos, best practices, training, interactive working sessions, tabletop exercises, and webinars to build industrial cybersecurity expertise and address shortages of OT security skills. Dragos has been supporting under-resourced organizations with free resources since 2022 with OT-CERT, which has over 1,500 members in 60 countries.

To learn more about the Dragos Community Defense Program or to apply to become a member, visit here. To read the Community Defense Program blog post, visit here.

If you like this article consider subscribing to our bi-monthly newsletter to get information about our portfolio, solutions, and insights delivered to your inbox.