Control Engineering Europe – March 2019

penetrate, especially
with APTs, and provide
an unrealistic sense of
security.
Standards such as
ISA/IEC 62443, the NIST
framework, NERC CIP, and
others have provided a
framework and a path
forward to designing
good OT security
postures for plants. The
ISA Security Compliance
Institute has provided
ISA Secure component
certification since 2010.
Standards compliance
does not necessarily result
in adequate or increased
cybersecurity protection.

OT cybersecurity
challenges
The basic OT cybersecurity
challenge is to deal with
the ongoing industry
transformation. First, it
is necessary to assess the
effectiveness of traditional
controls and cyber tools.
Traditional penetration
testing has been used for
this. The problem is it is
very difficult to operationalize these
traditional tools without considerable
training and overhead to get from the
theoretical to the practical.
The current challenge is moving the
perimeter from the physical plant and
a network-centric focus to the virtual,
which requires providing security to
edge components and applications. Edge
devices are numerous and proliferating.
This makes it impossible to provide
a secure cyber environment without
protecting edge devices in real time to
maintain security for each Level 0 and 1
device.
One main issue is the increase of
poorly-secured IIoT devices being
installed in plants to send data to the
cloud and then to the plant. These IIoT
devices can provide intrusion vectors that
are overlooked by plant operators and

engineers eager to get more data.

The plant is insecure if the supply

chain is insecure. The high integration

between the supply chain and the

control system required in modern

process plants makes the supply chain a

vector for potential attacks.

Active anomaly detection is needed

to maintain a secure plant network. This

makes it possible to achieve the posture

of predictive and preventive response

instead of reactive and conformance-

oriented activity. This includes outside-

the-plant threat intelligence. Often the

best option is to move from a reactive

approach to an adaptive security

posture.

The plant of the future will integrate

operational reliability monitoring,

security monitoring, and network

monitoring with process monitoring.

Detection will be transformed from

signature-based detection to anomaly

detection.

OT cybersecurity must be integrated

with management of change functions,

alarm management, safety systems,

and security information and event

management. The entire plant

operational system revolves around

security and safety. For many process

plants, it can be difficult to implement

a modern functional security position.

This is where companies specialising

in cybersecurity can be of assistance to

process plants.!

Camilo Gomez is global cybersecurity

strategist at Yokogawa Electric Corp.

This article originally appeared on

http://www.controleng.com

Cybersecurity must be applied in the process industries from the enterprise to the application level.

Control Engineering Europe http://www.controlengeurope.com March 2019 29

CYBER SECURITY