Book Image

Industrial Cybersecurity

By : Pascal Ackerman
Book Image

Industrial Cybersecurity

By: Pascal Ackerman

Overview of this book

With industries expanding, cyber attacks have increased significantly. Understanding your control system’s vulnerabilities and learning techniques to defend critical infrastructure systems from cyber threats is increasingly important. With the help of real-world use cases, this book will teach you the methodologies and security measures necessary to protect critical infrastructure systems and will get you up to speed with identifying unique challenges.Industrial cybersecurity begins by introducing Industrial Control System (ICS) technology, including ICS architectures, communication media, and protocols. This is followed by a presentation on ICS (in) security. After presenting an ICS-related attack scenario, securing of the ICS is discussed, including topics such as network segmentation, defense-in-depth strategies, and protective solutions. Along with practical examples for protecting industrial control systems, this book details security assessments, risk management, and security program development. It also covers essential cybersecurity aspects, such as threat detection and access management. Topics related to endpoint hardening such as monitoring, updating, and anti-malware implementations are also discussed.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
Title Page
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface

Patch management


Modern software, firmware, and operating systems are applications written with many millions of lines of code. It is easy to make mistakes and introduce bugs. New bugs for all kinds of applications are found daily and need to be addressed and fixed with updates and patches. Keeping regular IT systems and applications up to date with the latest firmware, software, and patch levels is already a daunting task, but things get even more complicated on an ICS network, especially down in the industrial zone.

Uptime requirements for critical ICS computer systems often don't allow them to reboot after updates—if updates are allowed to be installed at all. For those critical systems that are not allowed to be altered, a different approach to protecting them might be better. Systems such as these are prime candidates to have an application whitelisting solution deployed on them. We saw one example of a whitelisting solution, Microsoft's AppLocker, in the previous section and in an upcoming...