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Compelling need to build ICS resiliency across OT and ICS environments in 2023

January 8, 2023 – Published on Industrial Cyber

The growing prevalence of cybersecurity incidents targeting critical infrastructure environments, at times resulting in operational downtime, loss of production from destructive malware, or malicious insider activity, makes it imperative for these organizations to work on and structure their ICS resiliency framework. This year, as organizations continue to use OT (operational technology) infrastructure to monitor and control physical processes, operational environments remain at high cyber risk, as a result of global competition and geopolitical tensions.

OT environments also play a critical role in the supply chain. As these systems face an increasing number of cyberattacks, presenting a real threat to safety and production, and economic impact on a manufacturing organization. 

Given the critical role of OT and ICS frameworks, organizations need to establish and build their ICS resiliency to understand the impact of a potential cyber-attack, recognize the measures required to prevent, survive and recover from such an attack, and be able to assess and understand its real threat model. Additionally, enterprises must integrate and bring together people, technologies, procedures and policies to prevent cyber attacks from disrupting the course of operations. Their ICS resiliency plan must focus on the business recovering after a successful attack whilst keeping the impact of such an attack to the minimum.  

Industrial Cyber reached out to industrial cybersecurity experts to outline the key challenges that the OT sector will face in 2023, and how these can be overcome as organizations work towards building their ICS resiliency. 

“The pressure is up, with the government putting out more mandates and insurance companies adjusting their policies, the burden of securing their environment will continue to pile on for ICS owners,” Pascal Ackerman, senior cybersecurity consultant for OT at GuidePoint Security, told Industrial Cyber. “Knowing the current landscape of the state of current ICS cybersecurity, most companies will have to concentrate (still) on the fundamentals; Architecture, security monitoring, and response practices, those disciplines are lacking across the board.”

Ackerman said that in his opinion the OT workforce needs to start working closely with the IT workforce of an organization. “From experience, the companies that have their IT and OT team working closely together or even have a dedicated IT/OT team, are the companies that do ICS cybersecurity the most efficiently and effectively,” he added.

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