CSPI...ARIA Cybersecurity Protects Large US Steel Mills from Cyberattacks
ARIA AZT PROTECT secures critical production applications from attacks and dangerous unintentional ICS updates
BOSTON, MA / ACCESS Newswire / August 12, 2025 / ARIA Cybersecurity, a CSPi business (NASDAQ:CSPI) and a leading provider of cybersecurity solutions, announced a new customer deployment of ARIA's flagship solution, AZT PROTECT™, which works to protect steel plant operations at a mill of one of the largest US steel producers.
This large steel producer became concerned that attacks would get through IT defenses into its production OT network and take down critical production systems. The concerns are twofold in the steel industry. Not only can taking down a mill operation disrupt steel production, but it can also damage equipment and pose a real risk of harm to plant workers on the mill floors. Injuries in such facilities can be devastating and lead to loss of human life. The mill deployed AZT PROTECT to its critical production infrastructure. One of the key values of the product, known as Industrial Control System (ICS) Lockdown, was unexpectedly put to the test one evening. IT experienced an issue with the IT to OT network DMZ firewalls locking up. These types of problems are not uncommon as complex protection rules on firewalls can cause such lockups while adding an additional rule. They had to reset to default mode to get the firewalls to recover - whilst the site was protected from external attacks, a slew of vendor updates flooded into the OT network, before the proper firewall rules could be activated - a potential OT disaster as these application updates will force the critical applications to stop and reboot taking down operations abruptly and unsafely for any workers on the plant floor.
Fortunately, AZT PROTECT intercepted these updates and, as its policy was set for full ICS lockdown, it stopped the updates from executing, keeping the protected devices' applications up and fully operational. The Plant Manager was extremely pleased. "That could have been a bad day if that happened during a production run, even without production running, that number of updates could have taken several hours to process with devices facing multiple consecutive reboots. If any of these updates were untested for issues, which most were, they could have caused a long-term outage until the devices could be recovered. What could have been a very expensive lost production day was avoided."
AZT PROTECT provides a lock-down approach to protecting critical infrastructure applications from unintended updates as well as attacks, such as stopping all forms of malware, ransomware, and nation-state-backed attacks on these applications and the operating systems on which they run.
"We are extremely pleased that our product performed flawlessly for this customer in their time of need. We feel it's a testament to our team's ability to design effective products, but what was truly inspiring is this customer's production operation manager deployed the product across all his devices without our help," said Gary Southwell, President of ARIA Cybersecurity. "This shows that our product is not only effective but easy to deploy - not something you hear much of from production operations managers when they are talking about cybersecurity products!"
The AZT PROTECT solution utilizes patented reactive AI-based countermeasures to stop the attacks as they land on an operation's most vulnerable critical production control systems. These countermeasures lock down critical applications from unscheduled updates and adulteration while stopping code-based attacks, such as malware and ransomware, from executing. Further, they disrupt the techniques nation-state-backed attackers utilize to land, expand, and then escalate privileges to take control of such systems.
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