Industrial OT & ICS Cybersecurity
Spharaka Signal™
Built for Critical Infrastructure.
Industrial environments cannot afford downtime. Traditional IT security tools were never designed for operational technology, where visibility is limited, proprietary protocols dominate, and even a single disruptive scan can impact production.
Spharaka Signal™ extends the power of Spharaka Sphere™ into Operational Technology, delivering passive asset discovery, protocol-aware threat detection, industrial network visibility, and continuous compliance monitoring, without interfering with industrial operations.
Complete OT Visibility. Deep Industrial Intelligence. Zero Operational Disruption.
Purpose-Built for Industrial Security
Unlike traditional IT security platforms that rely on active scanning, Spharaka Signal™ adopts a passive-first architecture engineered specifically for industrial control environments.
Every network packet is analysed, enriched, and correlated to build a complete understanding of industrial assets, communications, operational behaviour, vulnerabilities, and threats, without modifying device state or interrupting production.
Built for environments where uptime is non-negotiable.
Why Industrial Networks Need a Different Approach
Operational Technology environments present challenges that conventional cybersecurity platforms cannot address.
Limited Visibility
Thousands of PLCs, RTUs, HMIs, historians, engineering workstations and IIoT devices often remain undocumented.
Protocol Diversity
Industrial networks use hundreds of specialised protocols that traditional security tools cannot interpret.
Zero Tolerance for Downtime
Production systems cannot tolerate intrusive scans, unnecessary traffic or endpoint agents.
Critical Infrastructure Threats
Modern attacks specifically target industrial protocols, safety systems and control networks.
Compliance Requirements
Industrial organisations must continuously demonstrate compliance with frameworks such as IEC 62443, NERC CIP and NIST CSF.
Spharaka Signal™ addresses each of these challenges using industrial-native cybersecurity.
Complete Industrial Asset Visibility
Know every device connected to your industrial network. Spharaka Signal™ continuously discovers, identifies and inventories industrial assets using passive network analysis and protocol intelligence.
A continuously updated industrial asset inventory becomes the foundation for threat detection, vulnerability management and compliance.
DPI for Industrial Protocols
Industrial cybersecurity demands more than protocol identification. Signal™ performs protocol-aware Deep Packet Inspection capable of understanding the operational semantics of industrial communications.
Every packet is processed through a multi-stage enrichment pipeline, providing complete network, process and security context for every event.
Industry-Leading Protocol Coverage
Signal™ supports more than 370 industrial and enterprise protocols across multiple operational domains, giving organisations visibility into mixed-vendor environments from a single platform.
Passive Vulnerability Management
Understand your industrial attack surface without introducing operational risk. Signal™ continuously identifies vulnerable devices through passive fingerprinting and protocol intelligence.
No active vulnerability scans.
No production disruption.
Only continuous visibility into industrial cyber risk.
Industrial Intrusion Detection System
Signal™ combines multiple detection methodologies to identify both known and unknown industrial threats.
Signature Detection
Detect known attacks using industrial protocol signatures and deep protocol inspection.
Protocol-Aware Detection
Understand misuse of industrial protocols, unauthorised commands and unsafe operational behaviour.
Behavioural Anomaly Detection
Automatically learn normal industrial communications and detect deviations that indicate compromise.
Signal™ identifies threats including:
Alerts are enriched with industrial context, dramatically reducing investigation time.
Segmentation Monitoring
Gain complete visibility across industrial communications. Signal™ continuously analyses:
Industrial segmentation policies are continuously validated against operational behaviour, helping organisations enforce secure Purdue Model architectures.
Threat Intelligence Built for ICS
Modern industrial attacks require industrial intelligence. Signal™ correlates detections with:
Security teams gain immediate context on attacker techniques, affected assets and operational impact.
Continuous Compliance Monitoring
Compliance should be continuous, not an annual exercise. Signal™ continuously measures industrial security posture against major operational security frameworks.
Generate audit-ready evidence, executive dashboards and compliance reports from a single platform.
What each edge sensor runs
Sensors observe mirrored traffic from a SPAN port, a network tap or ERSPAN. They are never in the traffic path and never transmit to a control device, which is what allows an evaluation to run against live production without a change window. Each collection module operates independently.
Deep packet inspection
Industrial and IT protocols decoded at the application layer, so a command is visible as a command rather than as a session.
Industrial intrusion detection
Suricata-derived rules tuned for ICS protocols, evaluated at line rate inside the sensor.
Passive asset fingerprinting
Devices identified from stack behaviour, TLS fingerprints, vendor prefixes, protocol banners and identity objects exposed in normal operation.
Session and flow accounting
Every conversation recorded, which is what makes observed topology possible.
Host and infrastructure telemetry
Syslog, Windows Event Log and SNMP from firewalls, switches, HMIs and engineering workstations.
DNS and TLS observation
Encrypted and name-resolution metadata, increasingly load-bearing as cleartext protocols are replaced.
Optional active OT polling
Opt-in, explicitly scoped, and never pointed at a safety controller.
From register numbers to process meaning
Most tooling stops at decoding. It can report that Modbus function code 06 wrote to register 40001, which tells a control engineer nothing useful. The questions that matter are which tag that register is, what engineering unit it carries, what its safe range is, whether it is safety-relevant, and which zone is permitted to write it.
Signal™ resolves every register through a five-tier ladder and records which tier matched, so semantic coverage is auditable rather than assumed. Resolution happens as the event is written rather than in a later batch, so safety relevance is queryable from the moment traffic is seen.
Customer override
Tags your integrator named differently from the vendor manual.
Exact model match
The register map published for that specific device model.
Vendor fallback
A vendor-wide map where the exact model is not catalogued.
Generic protocol
Protocol-level meaning where no device map applies.
Explicit miss
Recorded as a miss so coverage is auditable and the gap can be filled.
This is what makes a detection like alert when a write to a safety-relevant register comes from any zone other than the engineering workstation a single expression. No signature rule can state it, because a signature engine does not know what register 40001 means on that specific controller.
Three engines, one alert pane
No single technique covers industrial threat detection. Signatures catch known protocol abuse and miss an attack made entirely of valid operations. Behavioural models catch the unfamiliar but struggle to explain themselves. Signal™ runs all three over one event store and renders their output identically, because the analyst does not care which engine fired.
Signature detection
Runs inside the sensor at line rate against known industrial protocol abuse, with no dependence on the central platform being reachable.
Query-language rules
Multi-event, multi-asset logic written against resolved process meaning rather than raw bytes, which is what allows a detection to reference safety relevance directly.
Behavioural models
First-seen activity, statistical deviation, rate and change, and topology-aware zone-boundary crossing, each scored against the asset's own history.
Every alert, whichever engine raised it, opens with the same context: the contributing events, the asset, the resolved process meaning and the risk impact. Detections are mapped onto MITRE ATT&CK for ICS rather than the enterprise matrix, so coverage is measured against industrial adversary behaviour.
Detecting change you did not authorise
The consequential incidents involve a change to the controller rather than traffic towards it. Four artefacts are tracked continuously.
Program logic
Compared by hash against a captured baseline.
Configuration
Drift measured against an approved snapshot.
Firmware
Tracked against both the vendor release and your approved build.
Controller mode
RUN, PROGRAM, STOP and FAULT transitions, correlated against declared maintenance windows.
A controller moving from RUN to PROGRAM outside a maintenance window warrants an alert by itself. A program hash that diverges after that transition warrants a critical one. Signal™ captures both and links them, so the sequence reads as one event rather than two unrelated ones.
Four questions, one storyline
Exposure score
One number per organisation and per zone, with its trend.
Attack surface
What is genuinely reachable, from the internet, from IT into OT, and from OT into IT.
Blast radius
If one device is compromised, what follows through the conduits actually observed.
Attack paths
Ranked multi-hop routes from an initial foothold towards a control system.
Each panel links into the next, and every asset carries a risk score from zero to one hundred with its five-factor breakdown visible. Compensating controls subtract from that score, so a device behind strong segmentation is rated on its defended posture rather than on raw severity, which is what makes an estate of unpatchable equipment assessable at all.
Built for Industrial Deployment
Industrial environments require deployment flexibility. Signal™ supports:
Distributed edge sensors collect and analyse industrial traffic locally while securely forwarding enriched metadata to the central Signal™ Console, minimising bandwidth while preserving analytical depth.
Industries We Protect
Spharaka Signal™ is engineered for organisations operating critical infrastructure.
Part of the Spharaka Sphere™ Platform
Spharaka Signal™ is fully integrated into Spharaka Sphere™, enabling OT and IT security teams to operate from a unified autonomous cyber defence platform.
By combining industrial visibility with AI-native threat correlation, autonomous investigation and enterprise-wide security operations, organisations eliminate silos between IT and OT while improving operational resilience.
Key Highlights
| Capability | Coverage |
|---|---|
| Industrial Protocol Support | 370+ Protocols |
| DPI Protocol Decoders | 276+ |
| Industries Supported | 16+ |
| Industrial Event Schema | 364+ Security Fields |
| Passive Asset Discovery | ✓ |
| Deep Packet Inspection | ✓ |
| Industrial IDS | ✓ |
| Vulnerability Management | ✓ |
| MITRE ATT&CK for ICS | ✓ |
| Compliance Reporting | ✓ |
| Air-Gapped Deployment | ✓ |
| Multi-Site Architecture | ✓ |
Secure the Systems That Keep the World Running
Protect industrial operations with complete OT visibility, protocol-aware threat detection and continuous operational resilience.
Discover how Spharaka Signal™ brings autonomous cyber defence to industrial environments.
OT cybersecurity in depth
Signal™ is the product. These pages cover the subject it addresses, from the control layer up to the standards an industrial programme is measured against.
Frequently asked questions
What is Spharaka Signal?
Signal extends Sphere into Operational Technology. It provides passive asset discovery, protocol-aware threat detection and continuous compliance for industrial and critical infrastructure environments.
Will Signal disrupt our production systems?
No. Production systems cannot tolerate intrusive scans, unnecessary traffic or endpoint agents, so Signal discovers and monitors assets passively rather than probing them.
Which industrial assets can Signal discover?
Signal builds an inventory of PLCs, RTUs, HMIs, historians, engineering workstations and IIoT devices, the population that typically remains undocumented in industrial estates.
How does Signal detect threats in industrial protocols?
It combines three methods: industrial protocol signatures with deep protocol inspection for known attacks, analysis of protocol misuse and unauthorised commands, and behavioural baselining that learns normal industrial communications and flags deviations.
Which compliance frameworks does Signal support?
Signal supports continuous demonstration of compliance with frameworks including IEC 62443, NERC CIP and NIST CSF.
Why not use our IT security tools on the OT network?
Industrial networks use hundreds of specialised protocols that traditional security tools cannot interpret, so IT tooling produces both blind spots and false positives on legitimate industrial traffic.