Equipping Sitech Services with the Tools to Tackle Insider Threats Head-On

Located in Geleen, The Netherlands, Chemelot is a large chemistry and materials site of strategic importance to 150 institutions and companies — including multinationals such as Arlanxeo, AnQore, DSM, Fibrant, OCI Nitrogen and SABIC. It includes a number of startups and companies, such as Flowid, Isobionics, Pharmacell, and Xilloc. Its infrastructure is unique to support its community of customers; it has its own port and rail terminal, and is located next to main highways and pipelines. It’s directly connected with Antwerp, Rotterdam, and the Rhine-Ruhr region.

Chemelot is recognized as one of the most sustainable chemical sites in Europe. But through innovative R&D, it intends to become the safest, most sustainable, and completely climate-neutral industrial parks by 2050. Chemelot actively seeks cooperation with other companies and institutions to jointly realize these ambitions. Its director works closely with site users and represents their interests to assure a superior climate of business and innovation.

The Chemelot site relies on Sitech Services—a data-driven, technology partner working onsite—to help keep processes running smoothly. In turn, Sitech has partnered with ilionx – an EU channel partner of Exabeam – to monitor the entire IT landscape at Chemelot through its security operations center (SOC).

Leveraging all that the Exabeam Security Management Platform offers, Sitech is able to provide 24/7 protection and proactively detect the latest forms of cyber threats in a timely manner. Exabeam’s machine-learning solution detects security threats based on user behavior models rather than rules. By determining normal behavior through data science, deviations become quickly visible with the help of analytics. 

“With Exabeam, ilionx has deployed a detection method that uses the latest technologies. That’s exactly what we look for in a security partner, so we’re armed against the latest forms of cybercrime,” says Martin Reumers, Sitech IT security officer.

Cyberattacks have become more advanced and coupled with the growing prevalence of insider threats pose a significant threat to organization. Security orchestration, automation, and response (SOAR) minimizes the impact of potential security incidents by letting security practitioners detect threats and respond proactively. Automating response to an incident and accelerating the investigation helped the SOC at Sitech to minimize impacts of potential threats.

“Projects and major maintenance are tightly scheduled. When systems go down, it affects the schedule and causes factories to run less optimally,” says Reumers. Thanks to ilionx’s Exabeam-powered SOC, we can immediately respond to a potential threat.”

Hosted in the cloud and using a very high degree of automation, ilionx’s integration of the Exabeam solution took very little time. “The solution took time to map out and analyze patterns, but it was fully operational within three weeks,” says Martin Reumers. “I’m confident that with ilionx and Exabeam at our side, we will be able to respond quickly to incidents and improve our security landscape even further.”

Click to read the full Sitech case study.