OT Asset Protection

Know every asset. Protect every asset.
Touch none of them.

PacketViper builds comprehensive OT asset inventory passively – no active scanning, no agents, no operational risk – then enforces segmentation and protection inline.

You can’t protect what you don’t know exists. You can’t discover it by scanning what you can’t afford to disrupt.

23 undocumented devices. Three years. Standard state.

A manufacturing plant’s security team had been operating for three years when an outside assessor discovered 23 devices on the production floor network that no one had documented. Not rogue devices – legitimate production equipment added over time by operations teams without IT/security involvement. PLCs, HMIs, sensors, a legacy SCADA gateway running an EOL operating system.

This is the standard state of OT asset management. OT networks grow organically, driven by operational needs, managed by engineers who optimize for uptime rather than security visibility. The security team inherits an environment they never fully mapped.

Active scanning in OT environments solves this problem in IT environments and creates a new one in OT environments. A scan that causes a PLC to restart mid-cycle, or triggers unexpected behavior in a 20-year-old controller, or saturates a slow industrial network – that’s a security tool causing the kind of incident it was supposed to prevent. Most OT operators won’t permit active scanning for exactly this reason.

Passive, protocol-aware, continuous – invisible to the systems it’s watching

PacketViper’s asset discovery is passive and protocol-aware. It watches traffic flow through the transparent bridge – no active queries, no probe packets, no scanning – and builds an asset inventory from what it observes. Every device that communicates is catalogued: protocol, traffic pattern, connection relationships, behavioral baseline.

The inventory builds continuously. New devices appear when they first communicate. Behavioral baselines establish automatically – what this device normally does, what protocols it uses, when it’s active, what it talks to. Deviations from baseline trigger alerts.

Trust relationships map which assets talk to which other assets under normal operation. When an asset communicates with something outside its trust relationship – another PLC it has no operational reason to contact, a workstation that shouldn’t be sending commands to a controller – that deviation fires as an anomaly, inline.

Virtual agents interact with potential threats without exposing real systems. If unknown traffic appears on the OT network, a virtual agent can respond, probe, and characterize the source while keeping real production systems isolated.

Traffic Observed
Asset Catalogued
Baseline Established
Deviation Detected
Inline Response
BACnet DNP3 Modbus S7COMM NTCIP SNMP

Complete OT visibility without operational risk

Passive Asset Discovery

Builds complete inventory from observed traffic without active scanning – every device that communicates is automatically catalogued.

Protocol-Aware Baselining

Learns normal behavior per device – protocols used, communication patterns, activity windows – and flags deviations automatically.

Trust Relationship Mapping

Defines which assets communicate normally and triggers inline enforcement on unexpected connections between OT assets.

Virtual Agents

Interact with and characterize potential threats without exposing real OT systems – Deceptive Responders logic purpose-built for industrial environments.

Playbook-Driven Automated Response

OT-specific scenarios with pre-defined enforcement actions – unknown devices, protocol anomalies, trust boundary violations.

Continuous Inventory

New assets added automatically when they first communicate – the inventory is always current, no manual discovery cycles required.

Complete discovery. Zero scanning.

Zero

Active scanning required – complete asset discovery through passive observation only. Cannot trigger PLC restarts or unexpected behavior.

6 Protocols

BACnet, DNP3, Modbus, S7COMM, NTCIP, SNMP – native OT protocol awareness across the most common industrial stacks.

East-West

Trust boundary enforcement catches lateral movement between OT assets automatically – the attack path that most security tools miss entirely.

Every stakeholder in OT asset security

For Security Teams

Finally know what’s on your OT network – completely, continuously, without disruption. Stop inheriting environments you’ve never fully mapped.

For OT Operators

Nothing changes about how your equipment operates. The discovery is invisible to everything it’s observing – no scan packets, no agents, no configuration changes.

For Leadership

OT asset blindness is a board-level risk in a post-Colonial Pipeline world. Passive discovery eliminates that blindness without the operational risk of active scanning.

See what your firewall never told you.

Deploy passive discovery in your OT environment. We’ll show you what’s on your network that you don’t currently know about – in the first week, before any enforcement decisions are made.

How does PacketViper discover and inventory OT assets?

PacketViper passively discovers assets by observing network communications – identifying devices by their traffic patterns and OT protocol signatures without active scanning that could disrupt fragile industrial devices. Discovered assets are catalogued with communication profiles that form the basis of trust relationship enforcement.

What are trust relationships in OT security?

Trust relationships define which assets are expected to communicate with each other, on which protocols, and at what frequency. PacketViper models these expected patterns and treats any deviation – a device that has never talked to a PLC suddenly attempting a connection – as a threat indicator requiring immediate enforcement action.