Water, power utilities, hospitals get free access to zero-trust tools
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The Critical Infrastructure Defense Project, a partnership among Cloudflare, CrowdStrike and Ping Identity, will provide U.S. hospitals and energy and water utilities free access to zero trust solutions to help them defend against potential cyberattacks.
To help critical infrastructure entities enhance their cloud-based defenses as cyber risk increases due to the war in Ukraine, a trio of cloud vendors are offering eligible organizations free access to enterprise cloud security services and support for at least the next four months.
The Critical Infrastructure Defense Project, a partnership among Cloudflare, CrowdStrike and Ping Identity, will provide U.S. hospitals and energy and water utilities access to the following zero trust solutions:
- Cloudflare's zero trust network security, which includes secure DNS filtering, secure web gateway, zero trust access control, email protection, DNS infrastructure as well as web application firewall and DDoS mitigation.
- CrowdStrike's Falcon Endpoint Protection Pro and Falcon X Recon services which offer endpoint security to ensure that laptops, phones and servers are not compromised.
- Ping Identity's PingOne Cloud Platform, which features single sign-on, multi-factor authentication, risk management and orchestration services.
The three vendors have also developed a roadmap that all organizations can use to secure their cloud resources against frequent and sophisticated attacks that aim to steal data, compromise applications and shut down networks and devices. The roadmap takes a defense-in-depth approach and features a suggested timeline and step-by-step directions for deploying products within hours, days or weeks, or based on staff availability.
The Critical Infrastructure Defense Project "was born out of conversations with cybersecurity and government experts concerned about potential retaliation to the sanctions that resulted from the Russian invasion of Ukraine," CloudFlare Founder and CEO Matthew Prince wrote in a March 7 blog.
While retaliatory cyberattacks can target any industry, the project partners said the national security experts they consulted were "particularly concerned about three areas that were often underprepared and could cause significant disruption: hospitals, energy and water," Prince said.
“This is first and foremost a public service initiative to secure the endpoints and data of some of the most important critical infrastructure entities in the country,” said George Kurtz, CEO and co-founder of CrowdStrike. “We are in a position to help and we want to do all we can."
"With heightened targeting risk on our critical infrastructure, strong identity security is more important than ever,” said Andre Durand, CEO and founder of Ping Identity.
Cloudflare, CrowdStrike and Ping Identity will each provide one-on-one guided onboarding to organizations supported by the Critical Infrastructure Defense Project.
"We anticipate that, based on what we learn over the days ahead, the Critical Infrastructure Defense Project may expand to additional sectors and countries. We hope the predictions of retaliatory cyberattacks don't come true. But, if they do, we know our solutions can mitigate the risk, and we stand ready to fully deploy them to protect our most critical infrastructure," Prince said.
Eligible organizations can apply here.