In today’s era of connectivity, bad actors continue to up their game, recycling tactics and taking advantage of vulnerabilities across IT and OT systems. According to data from the latest Fortinet 2023 Global Ransomware Report, two-thirds of organizations were targeted by ransomware and 50% of them fell victim to an attack.
The White House continues to emphasize improved cybersecurity across the Critical Infrastructures sectors that heavily depend on Operational Technology (OT) environments to run their operations, noting the aging multi-vendor infrastructure and the dramatic impact if an attack is successful. While the outlook seems daunting, advance threat intelligence can inform security practices to ferret out the bad actor and protect your critical infrastructure from attack.
During this session, we will discuss three practical ways to leverage the insights provided by advanced threat intelligence to secure your OT networks.
1. Segmentation | Leveraging segmentation to reduce cyber risk when protecting operational systems, including Advanced Distribution Management Systems, SCADA Systems, Smart Meters, and Substations.
2. Detection & Orchestration | Designing detection and response systems to reduce the impact of an attack yet supporting both modern and legacy equipment without impacting the safety and uptime goals of the business.
3. Holistic Visibility | Providing visibility across not only the OT network but also end points like HMIs, Historians and Operations Stations becomes a critical component as part of the Incident Response to reduce the impact to operations in the midst of an attack.
Expected Outcome:
1. Advocate for improved engineering to support resiliency and governance by applying a security-first mindset to every initiative.
2. Understand the need to rethink regulations, treating them as a business risk initiative and not just compliance.
3. Simplifying the complexities of cybersecurity by leveraging a mesh or fabric architecture.
4. Best practices to implement a comprehensive Incident Response plan taking into account OT environments’ constraints.
Intended Audience: California State and Local Government Agencies (cities, counties) looking for guidance to improve OT cybersecurity posture.