Operational Technology (OT) Security: How to Reduce Cyber Risk When IT and OT Converge

Ciberseguridad industrial para entornos de OT

El mundo convergente de TI/OT actual presenta más desafíos y nuevos riesgos para la ciberseguridad industrial. Atrás quedaron los días en los que solamente el aislamiento podía mantener la seguridad de su entorno. Today’s sophisticated OT environment is a target for new attacks.

The convergence of IT and OT, and rapid adoption of IoT across both, increases your overall attack surface, as well as attack vectors. Without complete coverage, the likelihood of an attack is not a matter of "if," but "when."

Los controladores industriales son un foco de atención de los ataques contra las operaciones industriales y la infraestructura crítica.Entonces, ¿cómo puede mantener segura su superficie de ataque en constante expansión?

Tenable OT Security offers a comprehensive security solution for IT and OT security personnel. It can help protect your industrial networks from threats, malicious insiders and other risks by providing capabilities such as:

• 360-degree visibility into converged IT/OT environments and industrial control systems (ICS) activity
• A multi-detection engine that discovers high-risk events and behaviors that threaten your organization
• Automated alerts for policy violations and detection of deviations from your network traffic baseline
• Signature updates that use crowd-sourced data to discover new attacks
• Passive detection and patented active querying to find threats to your network and OT devices
• Up-to-date and detailed inventory list with risk data to help you prioritize vulnerabilities and plan maintenance
• Configuration control with reports about changes to OT assets including programmable logic controllers (PLCs), distributed control systems (DCSs) and human-machine interfaces (HMIs).

Cuidado con la brecha:A Roadmap for IT/OT Alignment

In your OT environment, your OT devices are increasingly connected, thereby creating new challenges in securing your industrial network. Air-gaps alone are no longer effective. That's because today's industrial attack surface now encompasses both IT and OT, making lateral attacks a growing threat. If an attacker finds a weak link on either side, they can use it as a gateway into your entire organization, quickly gaining access to both information and operations.

Historically, IT staff and systems were independent and isolated from OT staff and systems and vice versa. However, an increasing IT/OT convergence now creates a new source of unacceptable risk for your organization. So what can you do?

An integrated IT/OT security strategy may detect an attack earlier and help your team more effectively identify, investigate and address vulnerabilities and threats across your attack surface.

• Learn about how OT and IT are increasingly converging
• Get insight into your expanding attack surface and attack vectors
• Explore issues contributing to a disconnect between IT and OT security practices
• Learn about security and compliance best practices for industrial networks
• See the benefits of a converged IT/OT security strategy

Accidental Convergence: Una guía para operaciones de TI/OT seguras

Operational technology plays an important role in critical infrastructure and industrial environments. In addition to routers, servers, computers and switches used in traditional IT environments, to operate their plants and factories these industries also use OT devices such as distributed control systems (DCSs), programmable logic controllers (PLCs), and human-machine interfaces (HMIs).

For more than half a century, OT security professionals relied on physically separating these critical OT systems from outside networks to keep them safe. But today, IT and OT environments are increasingly connected. While this brings about a number of benefits for operational efficiencies, this convergence also creates new risks.

While threats that begin in IT can laterally move into your OT environment, OT threats aren’t necessarily the same as those that IT professionals are familiar with addressing. Because of this, you need different security tools and operating policies to secure your OT environment.

In this white paper, you’ll learn more about:

• What’s fueling IT/OT convergence
• Why air-gapping your OT systems is no longer effective
• What accidental convergence is and what can happen
• Threat actors looking to infiltrate your systems
• How you can plan ahead for your security including more visibility, better situational analysis, reduction of cyber risk and more.

Los tres casos de uso principales para la detección y la gestión automatizadas de activos de OT

When most industrial control systems (ICS) networks were designed and implemented decades ago, cybersecurity was not at the forefront for most organizations. As a result, most ICS networks lack basic security controls and the ability to automatically manage assets like you’d find in more traditional IT environments.

Unfortunately, attackers know this and that’s why ICS networks are increasingly under attack.

As your organization looks for ways to defend your ICS systems, automated asset discovery and automated asset management becomes critical. ¿Por qué? Because if you don’t have an up-to-date and accurate ICS asset inventory, you can’t effectively manage your risks. If you don’t know your risks, how do you secure your environment?

As your ICS network grows and your IT and OT networks continue to evolve, effective asset management will become an increasingly important component of your overall cybersecurity strategy.

Download this white paper to learn how to:

• Improve your incident response strategies
• Decrease resolution time
• Ensure operational continuity
• Efficiently comply with key industry regulations

Lista de control de consideraciones de ciberseguridad para ICS

A cybersecurity solution can help you better protect your critical infrastructure from threats by more effectively and automatically identifying all of your ICS assets and managing them, while adopting effective defense strategies.

But how do you know which OT solution is best for your organization’s unique needs? Will the solutions you’re evaluating support both your OT engineers and your IT security teams as you work to secure and control your critical infrastructure?

This ICS cybersecurity checklist was created to help you evaluate six key areas to help ensure that you’re selecting the best solution for your organization.

Download this guide to assess your status when it comes to:

• Detección y gestión de activos automatizadas.
• Detección de incidentes y respuesta.
• Monitoreo continuo de la actividad de la red.
• Validación de la integridad de los controladores.
• Evaluación de vulnerabilidades y gestión de riesgo.
• Disponibilidad de la arquitectura y preparación para uso empresarial.

Critical Infrastructure Cybersecurity: Actively Secure Your Industrial Environment in the New Era of Distrust

The operational technology environments within industrial and critical infrastructure industries today are larger than ever before. These environments have an increasing number of attack vectors meaning, in many cases, your organization should no longer ask “if” you’ll be subject to attack, but "when".

Within your industrial control system environment, if you’re using network monitoring only, you may miss an attack on a device. That's because network monitoring only gives you about 50% visibility into your converged IT/OT environment. Those blind spots could put you at risk for being infected for days—or even months—without you knowing.

Effective OT cybersecurity needs more than network monitoring. By adding device-based security measures to your program, you’ll have better situational awareness about your actual cyber risks so you can plan remediation and defense strategies accordingly.

Download this white paper to learn more about how you can:

• Improve your controller integrity by quickly discovering device changes made through physical connections
• Discover assets, even those that don’t communicate over your network
• Maintain “last known good state” data so you can enable holistic back-up and recovery strategies
• Monitor all routable components of your network