Risk Assessing Your ICS

Risk assessing is an integral component of managing industrial control systems (ICS). ICSs play an essential role across many industries and organizations must conduct them in order to operate safely.

Successful ICS assessments help your team understand the risks inherent to your system and ways to mitigate them, while providing an outline for safeguarding them.

Understand Your ICS

Risk Assessing Your ICS is key to ensuring the safe, reliable, and secure operation of any industrial facility. To do so effectively requires knowing your technology, its vulnerabilities, threats against it and creating effective defenses to stop an attacker from accessing critical assets in the first place.

Risk assessing conducted for Industrial Control System security typically are performed by professionals from Information Technology backgrounds; however, their experience may be limited when it comes to understanding ICS systems or their inner workings in general. As a result, it may be hard for these professionals to comprehend attackers’ intentions or how these vulnerabilities could be exploited by potential attackers.

Attackers primarily focused on inflicting asset damage or breaching containment are likely to do more damage to assets than to bankroll them, rather than simply siphon off money. A cyberattacker who gains access to an ICS system controlling an oil and gas rig or power generation plant, for instance, could potentially create an environmental disaster and release gases that cause human injuries even outside its perimeter.

An effective ICS threat framework, like MITRE’s ATT&CK for ICS framework, is key to understanding what tactics and techniques an attacker would employ against your industrial control systems (ICS). With this information at hand, mitigation strategies or controls that reduce vulnerabilities may then be developed accordingly.

Once an ICS risk assessment has been conducted, you can prioritize and implement cost-effective mitigations to secure your ICS for long-term resilience in case of attack or natural disaster. This step is key in protecting its operation over time.

Understand your ICS security program’s maturity level to ascertain how well it protects critical assets, so that you can make informed decisions regarding securing and complying with regulatory frameworks.

Goal of this process: Ensuring a thorough, practical, and effective risk analysis is carried out by a team with sufficient experience. Team size will depend on needs of the ICS facility being reviewed as well as anticipated outcomes from review.

Identify Your Threats

Identification is the cornerstone of risk assessing for your ICS environment. To do this effectively, gather information from both internal and external vendors regarding asset inventory, configurations, process flow and any vulnerabilities within it. Your findings will allow you to better comprehend these threats as well as find strategies to combat them.

There are a wide range of threats to industrial control system (ICS) systems, from hackers and other threat actors to malware and malicious software, that pose serious disruptions and impact human safety as well as your company’s bottom line.

In 2017, an attacker managed to disrupt an oil refinery overseas without causing any human safety incidents, yet still making operations difficult for the plant.

Therefore, industrial control systems (ICS) remain a prime target for attackers due to their easy accessibility and use in disrupting various industrial processes.

Thankfully, most attacks do not directly target individuals; rather, they typically aim at networks and infrastructure through social engineering schemes like phishing campaigns or malware infections.

One important thing to keep in mind when considering industrial control systems (ICS) networks is that many use open and cleartext protocols, which are susceptible to being exploited by attackers. Unencrypted packets could contain private details about your devices.

One effective method for mitigating risks is using a network activity anomaly detection tool. Such technology enables you to monitor all of your operational traffic and detect suspicious activities that might otherwise go undetected by manual monitoring alone.

As part of your ICS network management efforts, make sure all devices are current with patches and security updates – this is particularly essential when controlling physical processes with devices such as Programmable Logic Controllers or Remote Terminal Units.

Calculate Your Risks

Utilizing a risk assessment approach to identify vulnerabilities and evaluate your ICS vulnerability level can help prioritize mitigations. By analyzing risks you face, it becomes clear which defenses must be addressed first and which can be omitted altogether in order to reduce attack surface area.

As part of an evaluation of your critical ICS assets, when considering their configurations you may want to take into account:

Asset Attributes

An ICS asset’s vulnerability depends on multiple attributes, including its file structure, last change date and storage method. If an attacker were able to change these settings they could cause serious disruptions in production.

Cybercriminals possess a variety of tools at their disposal that can be used to compromise ICS systems. The threat landscape is constantly shifting, so you need an in-depth knowledge of all potential dangers facing your operation.

Step one to understanding your vulnerabilities is understanding your risk profile, which includes elements like your organization’s security maturity level and number of attacks it has been hit with. External sources, like data breach notifications or ICS threat reports can also provide useful insights.

Once you understand your risk profile, it is time to calculate the risks associated with each asset in your network. You can do this by looking at known CVEs and exposure scores.

An effective business risk analysis provides a good picture of any vulnerabilities within your organization and their potential damages, along with which defense mechanisms need to be put in place – for instance new security controls or firewall protection should be put into effect.

After this step is taken, the next step should be understanding how to prevent adversaries from accessing your ICS in the first place. This requires conducting an in-depth assessment of your security infrastructure and your ICS systems; consulting engineering teams could also be beneficial in understanding how they would respond in case of an attack as well as building resilience into your system.

Prioritize Your Mitigations

Once your threat profile is clear and you understand which risks are impacting your ICS, the next step should be prioritizing mitigations. While this task can seem daunting at first, prioritization will help prepare for potential future issues and ensure your mitigations are effective.

Risk evaluations consist of correlating threat intelligence with asset inventories and current vulnerability profiles to identify the most serious threats, and identify critical vulnerabilities with an aim of developing mitigation plans that address them.

Prioritization of risks typically utilizes a matrix. This method offers an easy yet effective means of ranking each risk by its likelihood and possible impacts on your operations.

Risk matrices usually contain two axes: the Y-axis charts the likelihood that something will occur and the X-axis displays its impact. Each of these is scaled from low to high risk with the highest risks found at the top right corner.

However, risk matrices don’t always accurately depict reality; an often made error in risk assessments is underestimate the significance of prioritizing risk management practices based on their importance and frequency.

Without an effective, scalable risk ranking system in place, your organization may end up addressing ineffective mitigation techniques, duplicative work or serious risks that go undetected. This can lead to ineffective mitigation efforts or duplicate work being employed without sufficient resource allocation for each one.

As this is often a complex challenge when managing large industrial systems and networks operating in highly dynamic environments, organizations must employ technology which provides comprehensive data on assets and vulnerabilities in an easily consumable format.

Organizations can conduct an ICS security risk evaluation in order to assess each device in their operational technology environment and make better decisions regarding equipment purchases while improving compliance with regulatory frameworks.

Automated ICS security risk assessments are a critical element of effective operational asset prioritization. By automating and integrating all your assets, vulnerability information, expert opinion data and defined processes into one solution, a highly relevant risk score derived from multiple sources of data can be calculated, giving you confidence to quickly remediate threats while executing compensating controls with certainty.