Industrial businesses that embrace transformation and have a holistic view of cybersecurity are benefitting from connected apps and devices – which can enhance business performance at an unprecedented rate.

Here's my seven steps to securing your IIoT network:

1. Embed cybersecurity into infrastructure design: Every company should make cybersecurity part of the industrial infrastructure design process. This way, you will make sure cybersecurity event risk reduction is enacted from the start versus implementing security controls after a control system has been deployed.

2 . Improve security event monitoring and log management: Cybersecurity event monitoring should be considered an essential and integral part of industrial cybersecurity. Through a centralised log collection approach, organisations and security professionals can gain an understanding of what information their devices are producing so that they can optimide performance and derive actionable intelligence to prevent cyber risks or downtime. 

3. Ensure you have an asset inventory: You must identify, apply value and understand risk of everything that is connected to your infrastructure. From controllers to human-machine interfaces (HMIs) to engineering workstations, all assets on your infrastructure should be accurately inventoried so there aren’t any unknown devices. This enables quick identification of rogue and unauthorised assets and improves incident response and risk assessment.

4. Awareness training: Ensure you embed cybersecurity into the organisation’s culture by providing timely, relevant and appropriate training to all employees covering both physical and digital. Ensure you have a clearly defined mechanism for identifying and reporting incidents. 

5. Configuration management: Harden and manage changes to the configuration for all devices connected to the infrastructure. This includes SCADA (Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition) systems, network devices, firewalls, controllers, connected workstations, servers and authentication systems. Benchmark these hardened configurations against industrial specific guidance, such as IEC 62443 or NIST SP 800-82 or CIS Standards to ensure compliance and facilitate a continuous posture check to be determined.

6. Perimeter controls and firewalls: Perimeter controls and firewalls are often considered as basic security capabilities, but too often they are not activated, configured or used properly. When it comes to industrial controls I suggest you chose one that performs deep packet inspection against the industrial protocol to block traffic that is trying to use the protocol in ways that it was never intended to be used.

7. Access and privilege control: Enforce role-based access across the entire infrastructure, including physical access to premises or restricted facilities. Define and configure user’s role within the organisation, to grant access to systems and devices based upon their job function so that only those who need to access systems or locations are able to.

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