Protect Factory Operations with In-Depth OT Security

Effective monitoring tools are essential for maintaining the integrity of manufacturing networks, enabling early detection, and responding to potential threats. Selecting and implementing the right tools can be challenging given the unique requirements and sensitivities of OT environments. You will need a practical plan to gradually implement OT passive monitoring tools with the goal of minimizing disruption to the manufacturing network and getting the most visibility coverage. Benefits from implementation of these tools can be measured in terms of the visibility gained by both the security operations center (SOC) and site stakeholders, as well as the reduction in mean time to respond to cyber incidents at site. Expanding visibility in the networks should include gaining an understanding of what normal looks like in the environment: Going forward, this baseline will help the team spot and investigate anomalies. 

Robust OT security operations, including incident response and vulnerability management, are essential for timely and effective threat mitigation. Due to the dynamic of the cyber threat landscape, you will likely find it challenging to develop and keep efficient processes for threat analytics, playbooks, and vulnerability management. Here are some tips for successful OT cybersecurity operations:

• Incident response: Combine the baseline understanding of the network environment with cyber threat intelligence and algorithms to develop tailored and adaptable defense. Develop OT threat analytics and playbooks to enable collaborative, effective, and efficient response to alerts from new OT security tools.
• Vulnerability management and cyber threat intelligence: Develop and implement processes to continually identify, prioritize, and remediate vulnerabilities. 
• Threat detection: Traditional cybersecurity metrics can be insufficient for managing risk and lack insights to inform leaders in other parts of the business about the threats to OT environments. Adversaries can take advantage of gaps in controls and visibility. To combat these issues, organizations should explore opportunities to use data-driven approaches within their OT environments to measure the amount of pressure being put on controls and, in turn, use a model to measure the effectiveness of any control protecting the product during a specific time. Such approaches can set common goals and expectations for key results to support alignment on what the effectiveness of a control means and measuring against it, in addition to giving the business tangible information about the threat activity the OT controls are facing. Measuring the level of threat pressure within an OT environment is useful in several ways:  
  • Increased pressure may increase the risk profile of a control or the OT environment.
  • Increased pressure or deviations in control effectiveness can help prioritize alerting or supply support to OT-related incidents.
  • Enhanced threat hunting and threat modeling can be achieved by using the threat data existing within an OT environment, rather than relying on reactive information shared by other organizations that often lack timeliness and details.

The effectiveness of these operations can be measured over time by the speed and efficiency of incident resolution executed by both enterprise SOC and site OT staff and the reduction in known vulnerabilities in the manufacturing environment.