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Securing Freight Rail Operations

Freight rail operates across a highly distributed OT environment, from yards to onboard systems. As connectivity increases, cybersecurity must protect critical operations while preserving safety and uptime.

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Challenges

The Main Challenges in Securing Freight Rail

Freight OT environments are large, distributed & changing

Assets operate across multiple locations and contexts, often with mixed vendors, system vintages, and ownership models. Without continuous visibility, teams struggle to understand what is connected, how systems interact, and where cyber risk is emerging as operations evolve.

Security signals lack freight rail context

Traditional security tools detect anomalies but do not understand rail-specific protocols like Edge Message Protocol (EMP) or ITCM. This creates alert noise and forces teams to manually determine whether activity reflects normal freight operations or a genuine threat to safety and service continuity.

Incident response must align with rail safety and operational constraints

Freight rail incidents frequently cross IT and OT boundaries, involving dispatching systems and 220 MHz radio networks, requiring coordination between security, operations, and maintenance teams

OUR Solution

How CylusOne Empowers Security Operations in Freight Rail

Unified Visibility Across Freight Rail OT

CylusOne delivers unified visibility across freight rail OT by continuously discovering assets, mapping IT/OT conduits and trust relationships, and monitoring behavior across infrastructure, wayside, and fleet - creating a shared operational picture across yards, depots, mainline, and onboard systems, including back-office / wayside / onboard PTC communication paths reducing blind spots and improving situational awareness in PTC-driven freight environments.

Security Insight Built for Freight Rail Operations

CylusOne applies rail-specific detection and analysis to translate raw network activity into meaningful security insight. By understanding freight rail protocols and message semantics, including Class I protocols and I-ETMS back-office/wayside exchanges, CylusOne reduces false positives and helps teams focus on events that truly matter to safety, availability, and system integrity.

Coordinated Response Without Service Disruption

CylusOne supports coordinated, rail-safe response by aligning security insight with operational realities. Security actions must not interfere with safety enforcement. As PTC is safety-critical, intrusive scanning or active blocking can trigger false penalty brake applications, disrupting the entire corridor. CylusOne enables teams to investigate and contain threats without disrupting service, integrates with existing SOC processes, and keeps freight rail operations at the center of decision-making.

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