Hardware Security for Critical Infrastructure
Operators of critical infrastructure, from energy and water to healthcare, transport, and telecommunications, are prime targets for sabotage and espionage. A successful attack does not just affect one company; it can disrupt essential services for entire regions.
Regulation reflects this. In Germany, KRITIS operators face strict security obligations, and the EU NIS2 directive expands both the scope of covered organizations and the expectations for risk management, supply chain security, and incident detection.
The Challenge
Critical infrastructure combines long-lived operational technology with modern IT, often built on hardware from international supply chains. Firmware-level compromise or manipulated components in this environment can stay undetected for years, because much of the equipment cannot run conventional endpoint agents at all.
NIS2 explicitly emphasizes supply chain security and the ability to detect incidents. Threats that live below the operating system challenge both: they enter through the supply chain and evade the detection tooling most organizations rely on.
Where BRIGHTCYTE Fits
- Monitoring operational and IT systems for covert communication
- Continuously monitoring critical environments for hardware-level threats, around the clock
- Strengthening risk analysis and detection capabilities for NIS2 alignment
- Investigating anomalies that software-based tools cannot attribute
BRIGHTCYTE helps critical infrastructure operators extend their detection capability below the operating system, adding visibility into covert communication from firmware, management engines, and potentially manipulated hardware. This supports both practical security and the growing regulatory expectations under KRITIS and NIS2.