Building Resilience for Operational Technology
Intelligent defense strategies for critical systems
The recent attacks on state water and wastewater systems highlight adversaries’ growing focus on the critical infrastructure that underpins everyday life. Intelligent, proactive cyber defense is essential to outpace AI-driven threats and protect the safety, reliability, and security of critical infrastructure systems. This is the reality of securing today’s environment.
Understanding the Cyber-Physical Threat
The federal government relies on millions of Operational Technology (OT) systems across numerous installations and buildings. These systems are responsible for real-time automated monitoring and control of industrial processes essential to operations across critical infrastructure sectors. Through the convergence of OT and IT, integrating legacy systems with modern installation infrastructure introduces new vulnerabilities and expands the attack surface. Today’s threat to OT networks is compounded by the use of AI by the adversary. In this environment, civil engineers and cyber leaders may face a range of challenges, including:
- AI-driven threats outpace human response, compressing the attack lifecycle and leaving OT defenders less time to detect, assess, and contain threats.
- No one tool or sensor provides visibility into all threats, making aggregation and correlation essential to seeing the whole picture.
- Cybersecurity skills are limited within the OT environment, leading to a lack of collaboration across IT and OT asset owners for effective cybersecurity.
- Legacy equipment and vendor restrictions limit endpoint tool coverage, thus limiting the efficient use of tools needed to maximize resource effectiveness.
Securing the OT/ICS Enterprise in 4 Steps
OT environments contain specialized equipment and software that often face strict engineering and change control processes. A resilient OT cyber defense strategy must involve all layers of operations, including organizational mission, industrial processes, IT network, OT running the ICS, and the security culture. By systematically inventorying, analyzing, and remediating vulnerable systems—and introducing continuous monitoring tools—organizations can manage risk and build resilience.
1. Inventory: Understanding the Assets
Creating a detailed inventory of all OT/ICS assets, including make, model, configuration, and dataflow, is essential. This inventory helps identify vulnerabilities and serves as the foundation for a process map used in further analysis.
2. Analysis: Mapping the OT Environment
ICS/OT environments demand high levels of uptime. Implementing and configuring security tools and logging activities could be perceived as disruptive to ongoing operations, complicating their integration into existing systems. Using a process map, security teams can tailor remedies to mitigate risk without disrupting OT/ICS activities. Collaboration between security teams and engineers helps identify traditional and nontraditional vulnerabilities. OT’s deliberate engineering allows for effective baselining and anomaly detection. Tactics could include:
- Leveraging Booz Allen’s OT AI capabilities for immediate full network and asset visibility with automated asset inventories and real-time topology mapping
- Executing maturity assessments and cyber risk assessments on current systems
- Expanding visibility through enterprise-wide anomaly detection and analytics
- Developing managed detection and response (MDR) models that balance response and remediation needs (insourced, hybrid, or outsourced)
3. Remediation: Implementing a Sound Strategy
Following the risk assessment, OT security experts can anticipate which components can be safely updated, where monitoring tools can be introduced, and which actions might cause system disruptions. Additionally, continuous analysis of real-time data against established baselines helps verify system responses and detect anomalies. We recommend:
- Implementing a zero trust architecture to ensure least privilege access to critical systems
- Testing software and hardware components in secure labs, such as Booz Allen’s OT Cyber Lab in Chantilly, VA, to ensure that patching security vulnerabilities maintains functionality and doesn’t inadvertently expand the attack surface
- Training teams on new tools and protocols for greater efficiency and speed
- Accelerating real-time defenses with machine-to-machine identity and AI-powered cyber technology
4. Continuous Visibility and Incident Response
Operators need visibility into both process and security environments to maintain a resilient OT defense strategy. Leveraging Booz Allen’s AI-driven OT threat detection capability can enable organizations to triage and autonomously correlate alerts, build contextual understanding, and investigate threats, reducing false positives. Further, this AI-driven OT capability can rank threats, carry out tailored response actions, and expedite cyber incident response, which is critical to an organization’s recovery.
Direct Work
Water and wastewater facilities represent a critical infrastructure domain where a successful cyberattack could have immediate and far-reaching consequences. Compromise of these OT environments could disrupt the production and distribution of safe drinking water, interfere with wastewater treatment processes, damage critical equipment, and create potential health and environmental hazards.
For Department of War (DOW) installations, these impacts extend beyond basic utility availability. A prolonged or targeted disruption could directly affect mission readiness, installation operations, emergency response capabilities, and the ability to sustain mission-essential functions.
To address these challenges, DOW commissioned Booz Allen and its industry partners to design, implement, and evaluate an integrated zero trust architecture within a simulated water treatment plant environment.
The solution successfully implemented:
- Least privilege access: Ensuring only authorized users, devices, and applications could access critical OT assets, including water towers, lift stations, Programmable Logic Controllers (PLCs), and Human-Machine Interfaces (HMIs)
- Microsegmentation: Isolating individual facilities, controllers, and operational processes so that if a cellular-connected device or lift station were compromised, an attacker would be unable to move laterally into the treatment plant or other mission-critical systems
- Continuous OT monitoring and threat detection: Providing real-time visibility into operational assets and enabling rapid containment of compromised equipment, reducing the impact of cyber incidents and preventing attackers from re-establishing persistence or targeting additional systems
Conclusion
No single utility or asset owner can solve the OT/ICS security challenge alone. By adopting a holistic and AI threat-driven approach, cyber leaders can effectively safeguard these critical systems and build resilience—ensuring mission continuity in the face of cyberattacks. We have the tools, frameworks, and methods to build this resilience now. Taking best practices and innovations developed across federal and commercial spaces, Booz Allen is here to solve complex OT/ICS challenges and stay one step ahead of the adversary with you.
