Cyber Insights 2023: ICS and Operational Technology

February 1, 2023 – Published on Security Week

Recognition of the cyber threat to industrial control systems (ICS) and operational technology (OT) systems has grown over the last decade. Until recently, this has been largely a theoretical threat founded on the danger of what could happen rather than what is happening. This is changing, and the threat to ICS/OT is now real and ongoing. The bigger danger is that this is likely to increase in 2023 and onward.

There are several reasons, including geopolitical fallout and escalation of tensions from the Russia/Ukraine war, and a growing willingness of criminals to target the ICS of critical industries. At the same time, ICS/OT is facing an expanding attack surface caused by continuing business digitization, an explosion of IoT and IIoT devices, the coming together of IT and OT networks, and the use of potentially insecure open source software libraries to bind it all together.

One of the biggest threats to OT comes from its convergence with IT. When the networks were separate, OT could be isolated from the internet and kept relatively secure. This is no longer reality.

Supply chain attacks cannot be ignored, either on the IT side or directly against OT. “Supply chain attacks continue to evolve for both ICS hardware and software,” comments Pascal Ackerman, senior security consultant for operational technology at GuidePoint Security. “Think implants for controls and automation equipment, attack chains that involve suppliers and service providers to ICS owners as an initial foothold or pivot point, and compromises on controls and automation vendors’ file repositories with the purpose of adding implants in the provided software.”

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