Top tips is a weekly column where we highlight what’s trending in the tech world and list ways to explore these trends. This week, we explore four ways organizations can secure their OT environment.
Operational technology (OT) has evolved from largely manual processes to digital, automated, and data-driven processes in recent years. As more industrial processes go digital, organizations in this sector now face a vastly expanded attack surface. This shift is driven by the convergence of physical and digital systems, along with the increasing involvement of IT in OT environments.
Cybersecurity now takes on an even more vital role, directly affecting the day-to-day functioning of critical infrastructure and industrial environments like electricity grids, oil and gas pipelines, and manufacturing plants, where any security-related flaw could have serious consequences. A notable recent example is the Colonial Pipeline attack that shut down one of the largest oil pipeline networks in the United States. While the attack didn’t affect the OT systems managing the actual flow of oil, the breach of the company’s IT systems resulted in a complete operational standstill. Such cases serve as a reminder of the numerous risks to OT systems. In this article, we’ll be looking at four strategies organizations can employ to secure their OT environment.
1. Monitor every single aspect of your OT environment
Visibility is the name of the game. Making sure you have eyes on every process, device, and user within your environment ensures you stay on top of the numerous threats that lurk around every corner. Even this level of visibility doesn’t guarantee you stay totally secure. However, it can ensure that you’re quickly made aware of any breach that might occur. Remember, the worst kind of security breach is one you’re not even aware of, as this can lead to attack escalations through lateral movement across your environment. Maintaining comprehensive event logs with a reliable anomaly detection mechanism alerts you to suspicious activity that could indicate a breach attempt.
As with any kind of organizational infrastructure, it’s of the utmost importance to perform regular assessments and penetration tests to make sure you are covering known vulnerabilities. This makes your OT environment as resilient as possible.
2. Implement strict access controls
It is important to be extremely selective when granting access to your critical industrial infrastructure, considering the stakes involved. Organizations should implement strict role-based access controls, adopting these security approaches for each user and device in the environment:
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Principle of least privilege (PoLP): Limit access rights to only what users or devices need for their particular roles.
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Zero Trust approach: Assume no user or device is trustworthy by default and continuously validate access requests.
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Multi-factor authentication (MFA): Use multiple layers of authentication for all access requests.
Make sure to regularly audit and adjust access levels for all users within the organization to ensure no one has a higher level of access than necessary. This adds an additional layer of security to your environment.
3. Patch management
Keeping all of your OT systems up-to-date with regular patches is a relatively simple yet vital step to keep your environment secure. Patches include general security updates, fixes for known vulnerabilities, performance upgrades, and sometimes even completely new features. If you don’t have a robust patch management process, you’re asking for trouble. Unpatched and out-of-date systems are an easy target for malicious actors as they do not include the same defenses and vulnerability fixes as the latest versions.
4. Network segmentation
Network segmentation is a critical strategy for securing OT environments by dividing your network into smaller, isolated sub-networks, each with its own security configurations and access controls. These sub-networks act as independent units, restricting communication between them to only what’s necessary.
This approach effectively limits lateral movement, a common tactic used by attackers to escalate breaches within a network. If a malicious actor or program compromises one segment, the isolated nature of the other sub-networks ensures the threat is contained, minimizing the potential damage.
Securing your OT environment
With a seemingly never-ending stream of new and worryingly effective attack vectors being revealed, organizations need to adopt proactive and comprehensive approaches to OT security. We’ve touched upon how OT security breaches can have dire consequences as they involve large-scale, critical industrial processes. There is no margin for error, and organizations should ensure they’re keeping their OT network secure while devising strong recovery plans in case they face a security incident. In today’s security landscape, it’s not a matter of if you come under attack; rather, it’s a question of when.
This is a very informative post. Thank you for sharing these tips!