Boston Beer Secures its Manufacturing Environments with the Dragos Platform and OT Watch

OT cybersecurity plays a critical role in ensuring the safety, efficiency, and reliability of food and beverage manufacturing processes. As these industries increasingly adopt automation, interconnected devices, and digital technologies, they become more vulnerable to cyber threats.

The case study details the Boston Beer Company’s implementation of the Dragos Platform and OT Watch threat hunting service to secure its four US breweries, which resulted in 100% ROI in its first year and a modernized infrastructure. The Boston Beer Company is the organization behind brands like Samuel Adams, Dogfish Head, Truly, Twisted Tea, and Angry Orchard.

A few key points from the case study include:

• Problem: When Brandon Catalan joined as Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) in 2021, the company had invested in IT cybersecurity programs, but struggled to keep up with the resource demands required to maintain its systems. Both corporate IT security and OT security at the company’s breweries were targeted for modernization.
• Solution: Catalan ran a strategic tabletop exercise simulating a ransomware scenario which revealed the company’s vulnerabilities and catalyzed the search for an advanced OT cybersecurity platform. The company chose Dragos as a partner for its ability to provide comprehensive security for OT/ICS systems.
• The Dragos Platform: The platform delivers enhanced visibility, monitoring, and control of OT environments, automates discovery, management, and monitoring of all assets within the OT environment, provides corrected, enriched, prioritized guidance for managing vulnerabilities, rapidly pinpoints malicious activity in OT/ICS networks, and facilitates comprehensive incident investigation. The Dragos Platform was first deployed in the company’s IT infrastructure before implementing it across all four of the company’s US breweries. The platform helped in identifying root causes of operational issues, inventory assets through real-time network schematics, and troubleshoot operational issues.
• OT Watch: This service adds an essential layer of advanced and scalable industrial threat hunting to the cybersecurity capabilities of the Dragos Platform. It hunts for key steps an attacker must perform to install their tools, gain access, propagate access, and achieve desired outcomes.

The Results Speak for Themselves

Boston Beer’s implementation of the Dragos Platform and OT Watch resulted in:

• Alignment between IT and OT teams, leadership, and the board about the importance of securing OT environments
• A 15% year-over-year reduction in cybersecurity insurance premiums
• A 100% ROI in the first year of a five-year investment

Download the case study to learn more.