Securing industrial control system environments: the missing piece

Abstract

Cyber-attacks on Industrial Control Systems (ICS) are no longer matters of anticipation. Industrial infrastructures are continually being targeted by malicious cyber actors with very little resistance on their paths. From network breaches to data theft, denial of service attacks to privilege escalation; command and control functions have in some way been exerted on targeted industrial systems. Safety, security, resilience, reliability and performance require private industrial control system user organizations and the public sector to device strategies and steps towards dealing decisively to these emerging and increasing ICS cyber security concerns. There are already couple security solutions proposed by governments, private organizations, academia, and industries for achieving this goal. This discourse reviews the ICS security risk landscape, current security strategies and solutions with a view to discovering the gaps or weaknesses in the effective mitigation of cyber-attacks, and the enhancement of cyber security. Notable fissures in existing ICS security solutions include: greater emphasis on technology security while discounting other critical bits like people and processes, which is clearly incongruent with emerging security threats and attack trends, the unilateral dimension strategy towards security which focuses more on SCADA systems, and the emergence of more sector-specific solutions as against generic security solutions. Better solutions include approaches that follow similar evolutionary patterns as the problem trend. These include cyber security measures that would embrace constant evolution in response to changes in the threat, vulnerabilities, attacks, and impact domains. Solutions that recognise and capture; people, process, and technology security enhancement into a single system entity with holistic provisioning that can meet all three-entity vulnerabilities for a more secured ICS environment.

Extended Dependency Modeling Technique for Cyber Risk Identification in ICS

“…Ani et al [16] and Akbarzadeh & Katsikas [17] introduced the concept of functional dependency modelling analysis that evaluates the cascading effect of physical connections of ICS components within a three-level architecture and analyses the security features in each level. Based on the identified assets, the authors used the Attack tree method to define cyber events (what would happen to the system), considering known threats and vulnerabilities within the level.…”

Cybersecurity capabilities for critical infrastructure resilience

“…Although some of the frameworks in Table 2 are specific to the water sector, the majority are more generic for all types of CI. An evaluation of these has revealed that even though ICS cybersecurity requirements are not adequately addressed by information security, IT security and security audit assurance practices ( Krotofil et al , 2019; Ani et al , 2018; Weiss, 2014), these are still widely used in ICS environments for the protection of CI (Knowles et al , 2015). A process flow of the development of the CI cybersecurity capability framework is shown in Figure 6.…”

A review of critical infrastructure protection approaches: improving security through responsiveness to the dynamic modelling landscape

“…In addition, responses in form of solutions are typically responsive to, and trail similar paths as the direction of growing malicious events. Moreover, these sectors appear not to be suffering increasing cyber-attacks judging by known recorded incidents [43]. While it may be rational to focus solutions where there are greater threats and risk challenges, the potentials for common cause failures are very imminent, hence, it is crucial to also give a good measure of attention other CI sectors.…”