ICS (or Industrial Control System) cybersecurity refers to the protection of industrial control systems from threats from cyber attackers.
ICS cybersecurity includes a wide range of practices including:
- Asset inventory and detection
- Vulnerability management
- Network intrusion protection and detection
- Endpoint detection and response
- Patch management
- User and access management
Over the past decade, ICS cybersecurity has become considerably more important as cyber-attacks increasingly focus on physical processes for either ransom or to cause harm to critical production systems.
Attacks such as those at the Oldsmar water treatment plant, the various ransomware attacks on the vaccine supply chain, and the more extensive threats to the Ukrainian and US power grids and oil refineries in the Middle East generate greater worry for boards, governments, and operators of industrial organizations.
It is important to understand that there are considerable difference in ICS cybersecurity compared to the more prosaic IT-type security modality. For one thing, in ICS cybersecurity, the type of devices protected are often sensitive to unintended changes or interaction, including a whole new class of OT assets known as embedded equipment, and are typically much older than IT systems.
Also, in ICS cybersecurity, risks are not only to information confidentiality but especially to the availability and integrity of the process or safety to personnel and property. Additionally, the remediation of risks requires different techniques because of the differences in types of devices.
Want to know more? Tonex offers ICS Cybersecurity Training, a 4-day course that provides a detailed overview of industrial control systems, typical system topologies and architectures, different types of threats and vulnerabilities to industrial systems.
This course also covers ICS fundamentals, ICS security architecture, ICS vulnerabilities, ICS threat intelligence, NERC Critical Infrastructure Protection (CIP), ICS risk management and ICS risk assessment.
Participants learn about ICS auditing and assessment, IEC 62443 standard for system security, ICS implementation and development, ICS incident response, ICS network protection, ICS server protection, SCADA security policies and standards, SCADA cyber-attacks detection, and a lot of labs and hands on examples.
For more information, questions, comments, contact us.