Perseus Products

Limited release

NetOps

Proactive vulnerability monitoring for automation and control estates. NetOps is in limited release: it is in final testing, with proof-of-concept deployments at organisations running large-scale estates, and we make it available to selected organisations. Built for system integrators and maintenance providers who want to offer SOC services to the plants they know, and for large SOCs that want to see exposure before an incident. Multi-tenant by design, and it works for air-gapped estates: the import modules carry everything the engine needs, without network reach.

From inventory to exposure, per site

Overview

NetOps holds the estate: tenants, entities, sites, systems under consideration, zones and conduits, and the devices inside them. For every device it keeps the operating system, installed software, installed patches and, for industrial products, the vendor, order number and firmware version. That inventory is what the Vulnerability Core Engine assesses.

Inventory can arrive three ways: a remote collector at the site that only ever talks outbound, central probing where the network allows it, or an import. The import path is the one that matters for air-gapped plants: a document produced on the isolated network carries the host and device inventory across, and NetOps assesses it exactly as it would a connected estate.

Estate model

Tenants, entities, sites, systems under consideration, zones and conduits, and the devices inside them.

Import modules

Host and device inventories from isolated networks: operating system, software, patches and product versions.

Remote collector

An outbound-only agent packaged for Debian-based hosts; it leases jobs and returns results, and nothing reaches in.

Engine-backed findings

Every device's findings come from the Vulnerability Core Engine through its API: scores, exploited-in-the-wild flags, vendor statements and fixes.

Every NetOps finding comes from the Perseus Vulnerability Core Engine, which NetOps consumes through its API. This is what the engine holds.

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vulnerabilities in the corpus

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exploit and proof-of-concept records

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affected products

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vendors

Capabilities

What is in the current release

Status is stated honestly: features marked as not yet shown are in the release but not yet captured in a demonstration.

Shipped

Device inventory and estate tree

Devices with types, tags, interfaces and addresses, organised by entity, site and system under consideration.

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Offline inventory and estate import

Import a host inventory produced on an isolated network, or a whole estate document with sites, zones, conduits, links and devices. The air-gapped path.

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Remote collector

Outbound-only agent with per-collector keys and sealed credentials; it leases jobs, executes them at the site and returns results.

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Per-device vulnerability assessment

Findings with scores from every scoring party, exploited-in-the-wild flags, exploit probability, remediation actions and vendor statements, from the engine's API.

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Vulnerability explorer

Search the engine's corpus by vendor and product with indexed product identities, and open a detail drawer with attack path, remediation guidance and vendor statements.

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Fleet master plan

Fix once, resolve many: the engine's fleet assessment ranks the single actions that clear the most findings across the estate.

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OT posture by site

Product-family exposure per site for industrial products the engine knows at family level, with the unmatched shown as unmatched, never as clean.

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VEX export per device

Export a device's assessment as OpenVEX or CycloneDX VEX, with every vendor statement the engine holds for its findings.

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Order-number matching

Industrial devices are matched by vendor order number and firmware version, the identity plant engineers actually record.

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Incomplete-scan surfacing

When an assessment is capped, the device says so. A capped device is never counted as clean.

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Change-feed reactions

Exploited-in-the-wild listings and delistings, vendor withdrawals and product-scoped changes trigger targeted re-assessment and land in the event log.

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Alert rules

Threshold, reachability, backup, exploited-in-the-wild and site-exposure rules with derived severities.

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Command view

A SOC wall: exposure levels per site and zone, a map of sites clustered by level, an intelligence ticker and a maintenance planner that turns exposure into work orders.

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Zones, conduits and topology

IEC 62443 zone and conduit model with a Purdue-style diagram, undeclared crossings highlighted, and a routed layer-3 view.

Shipped, not yet shown

Certificates, subnets and backups

Certificate inventory with expiry sweeps, subnet and address utilisation, and configuration backups with change detection.

Shipped

Reachability and resource monitoring

ICMP, SNMP, WMI, SSH and vendor-API probes into a time-series store, with a per-device kill switch for assets that must never be probed.

The import path

What an offline import carries

The import document is produced on the isolated network and moved across by whatever means the site allows. This is what it contains, and therefore what the engine can assess without any network reach.

Fields in the host inventory and estate documents
SectionWhat it carriesWhat it enables
Host operating systemType, edition, version, build, architecture, install datePatch-state-aware matching of operating-system vulnerabilities
Installed softwareName, version, publisherApplication findings with fixes and upgrade paths
Installed patchesHotfix identifiersSuppression of findings the installed build already fixes
Services and interfacesService state and start mode; addresses, MAC, speed, statusContext for exposure and reachability
Industrial devicesVendor, model or order number, firmware versionOrder-number matching and product-family posture
Estate structureEntities, sites, zones, conduits, systems under consideration, linksExposure per site and zone; undeclared crossings

The host inventory document and the estate import document, as used in the sample estate.

Inventory in, exposure out

How it works

  1. 1

    Collect or import

    A collector at the site, central probing, or an import document from an isolated network.

  2. 2

    Model the estate

    Entities, sites, zones, conduits and systems under consideration hold the devices.

  3. 3

    Assess

    Each device's inventory goes to the Vulnerability Core Engine through its API and comes back as findings.

  4. 4

    Watch the feed

    Exploited-in-the-wild listings, withdrawals and product-scoped changes trigger targeted re-assessment.

  5. 5

    Prioritise

    Fleet master plan, exposure levels per site and a maintenance planner turn findings into work.

  6. 6

    Report

    Alerts, VEX exports and posture views for the plant, the SOC and the customer.

Showcase

On a sample estate

A sample estate: three tenants and more than two thousand devices, every one assessed through the Vulnerability Core Engine. Device vendors and product families are real, because the findings are real engine answers for those products; sites, hosts and addresses are made up. Nothing on this page takes input.

Command view: a distribution utility, 300 substations

The SOC wall for the largest sample tenant: 2,100 devices across 300 substations in three divisions, every site clustered by exposure level on the map, the live intelligence ticker, the top maintenance actions with the sites each one clears, and the consolidation meter showing how many engine calls the baseline cache saved.

Sample data

Command view: a SOC provider watching air-gapped plants

The same wall for the SOC-provider tenant: three isolated plants on two continents whose inventories arrived by offline import. Ninety-nine devices, all assessed, with newly applicable vulnerabilities surfacing in the ticker as the engine's corpus moves.

Sample data

Monitoring is disabled for this device. NetOps asks for its operating system, packages and updates, by hand or from a file.

The import moment, on one workstation

An engineering workstation in a refinery control room that nothing has ever probed. The offline inventory document is uploaded on its device page; NetOps records the operating system, updates and software, and the engine's assessment fills the Vulnerabilities tab. Step through the four screens; each one enlarges in place.

Sample data

  1. 5Critical

    An exploited-in-the-wild finding on a control device or inside a zone with a security-level target of 2 or more, or a network-reachable exploited-in-the-wild finding that has a public exploit.

  2. 4High

    Any other exploited-in-the-wild finding, or a network-reachable critical finding with a public exploit.

  3. 3Elevated

    A critical finding, or a network-reachable high finding whose exploit probability is not negligible.

  4. 2Guarded

    A high finding.

  5. 1Low

    Assessed devices with only lower findings, or none.

  6. 0Unknown

    No assessed device at the site. Never shown as clean.

Levels are decided per site, zone and entity from the engine's active findings on the devices there, and the driver that set the level is named next to the badge. Sites on the same level are ordered by a weighted score, and every level-5 site raises an alert.

The alarm scale behind the Command view

Six exposure levels, decided per site, zone and entity from the engine's active findings. The rule is deliberately conservative: a site with no assessed device is unknown, not clean, and the finding that set the level is named next to the badge.

Maintenance planner

Ranked updates by what each one clears across every site and device that carries it: one operating-system build, one browser package, one controller firmware. Rankings come from the engine's assessment of the inventory, with findings and exploited-in-the-wild counts per action.

Sample data

OT posture by site and vendor

Advisory exposure for the industrial products at each site: product-family counts from the engine's shared corpus, by sector and vendor, with the honest note that these are exposures for the product families, not host-confirmed findings.

Sample data

Zones and conduits with reconciliation findings

Every device zoned, every observed crossing checked against the declared conduits, and each unmanaged path listed with its evidence. Security-level targets shown as not assessed until someone assesses them.

Sample data

Every device with a position, live

The distribution utility's 2,100 devices across 300 positions, clustered at this zoom, with layers for reachability, alerts, vulnerabilities and exposure. Devices whose last check is missing are shown as unknown, never as online.

Sample data

Network topology

Physical links discovered over neighbour protocols and MAC tables, drawn per network, with pending and manual links marked and unknown neighbours shown as such. Subnet and routed views sit on the same page.

Sample data

Device inventory and estate tree

Devices grouped by entity, industrial system and system under consideration, with type, addresses, reachability, status and patch level. Devices that must never be probed simply are not.

Sample data

One controller order number with its firmware version returned 568 findings, all matched by order number at confidence 0.9. One device's VEX export carried 1,119 vendor statements and took six seconds. One feed tick drained 7,116 vendor withdrawal events in under seven seconds. An explorer query by product identity answered in 0.27 seconds.

Measured against the production engine

Probes run by NetOps against the live engine API.

On the isolated network

A script writes one document per host

Here an engineering workstation, Dell Precision workstation, never probed by anything. The file crosses the air gap by whatever means the site allows.

Produced by an inventory script run on the host.

What NetOps reads from it
  • Operating system

    Microsoft Windows 10 Enterprise LTSC 2019, build 10.0.17763.3650, 64-bit

    enables patch-state-aware matching of operating-system vulnerabilities

  • Installed software

    12 entries with versions, for example Mozilla Firefox ESR 115.10.0

    enables application findings with fixes and upgrade paths

  • Installed patches

    5 hotfix identifiers

    enables suppression of findings the installed build already fixes

  • Services and interfaces

    4 services, 2 interfaces

    enables context for exposure and reachability

On the device page

The inventory is assessed through the engine

The device keeps its "monitoring disabled" state and gains a software list, a patch level and a Vulnerabilities tab: findings with scores, exploited-in-the-wild flags, fixes and vendor statements. A capped assessment says so on the device; it is never counted as clean.

no network reachsame findings as a connected host

The workstation is a sample; the software names are real, because those are what get assessed.

How an offline import becomes findings

The air-gapped path, step by step, on one workstation's inventory document: what the site produces, what NetOps reads from it, and what the device page gains once the engine has assessed it. The captured screens follow.

Sample data

At the site

One Debian package

It carries its own runtime and every protocol library, so the host needs no interpreter, no container runtime and no network access at install time. An air-gapped site is a normal install, not a special case.

The technician enters the NetOps address and the collector's key once; the collector enrols.

Outbound only
  1. Hello: the collector introduces itself and receives its poll intervals.
  2. Heartbeat: about every thirty seconds; a silent collector is shown offline, not assumed healthy.
  3. Lease: it asks for jobs; the lease is the only channel that carries credentials.
  4. Result: it posts results back, and each result acknowledges its job.
no inbound portsnothing reaches in
Jobs it runs at the site
  • · SNMP, WMI and firewall-API metrics
  • · Configuration backups
  • · Software inventory
  • · Device enrichment over SNMP, SSH, Telnet and WMI
  • · LLDP and CDP topology
  • · Live TLS certificate probes

NetOps keeps all configuration and credentials centrally; the collector holds none at rest. Credentials travel only inside a leased job, sealed to the collector's own key, and the collector's identity survives upgrades and reinstalls so sealed jobs keep opening. A built-in doctor command prints the key fingerprint a site can check against the console.

How the remote collector works

Where the network allows it, a collector inside the site does the device work: one package to install, outbound connections only, jobs leased from NetOps and results posted back. Credentials never rest on the collector.

Collectors online at three air-gapped plants

The SOC provider's collectors page: one collector per plant, each online with its agent version and last heartbeat, and actions to review jobs, rotate the key, pause or revoke. Collector keys are masked.

Sample data

Questions we are asked

FAQ

Not on general release. NetOps is in final testing, with proof-of-concept deployments at organisations running large-scale estates. We are opening it to selected integrators, maintenance providers and SOCs whose estates fit the current release. Tell us about yours and we will say whether it fits now.

Join the limited release

Tell us about the plants you maintain or monitor and how inventory reaches you. If your estate fits the current release, we will take you through the estate model and the import path.