OT Security Blog Articles
Insights on Resilience, Vulnerability Management, and More
OT asset inventory made easy
By Walt Boyes This is part of a blog series. Please read Part I and Part II here. When last we left our hero, he was juggling maintenance issues and cybersecurity, and trying to create an OT asset inventory with Excel and SQL. He bought and installed an ICS...
Contextual metadata ties technical OT asset information to use cases
By Walt Boyes This is part of a blog series. Please read Part I here. Our hero has been trying his very best to follow rule number one: you cannot measure what you cannot see, and you cannot protect it either. Unfortunately, and as you might expect if you have been...
Why manual OT asset inventories don’t work
By Walt Boyes When we last saw our intrepid maintenance lead cybersecurity chief, he was waking up in the middle of the night from dreams of being the little Dutch boy with his fingers in the dike. Now, his manager has told him that because of the worsening economic...
When Cybersecurity Vendors focus on the OT network and ignore the Plant Floor
By Walt Boyes Congratulations! Along with your other responsibilities as Maintenance Engineer, your boss has just appointed you OT Cybersecurity lead. So now you have to find time and budget for cybersecurity. What do you do first? You look around for companies that...
Boyes: No OT vulnerability management without an OT asset inventory
By Walt Boyes What we know is that we can’t manage OT asset vulnerabilities from the vulnerability side of the equation. We know that doesn’t work, because the vulnerability space is continuously shifting and morphing as even more vulnerabilities are discovered....
Boyes: Taking a hard look at OT threat detection
By Walt Boyes When you want to control something, you must measure it. You cannot control something you cannot measure. That’s what we do in OT- we measure and then control the variables that are meaningful to the process we manage. There are other variables...
Boyes: Use common sense in OT security
By Walt Boyes Our last article identified some serious and quantifiable risks for cyberinfrastructure failure not caused by external threat actors. These risks form the basis for most cyber threats OT companies face. Are there real external threats? Of course....
Boyes: OT security defenders need to look inside, not outside
By Walt Boyes For over a decade, we have been reacting to the fear of cyber intrusion into OT (Operations Technology) networks in our industrial process plants, refineries, pipelines, and drilling rigs. We have dropped everything to patch apparent vulnerabilities...
IT/OT Collaboration: The Blueprint for Operational Synergy
There is a notion that IT and OT teams are like oil and water. The two, even when inhabiting the same space, remain separate. Many companies treat the two teams this way. In doing so, they are missing an extraordinary opportunity: IT/OT collaboration. When thoughtful...