Industrial Cybersecurity: Efficiently secure critical infrastructure systems

The diagrams and explanations in this book are excellent. You can skip around or read it through. If are looking for a book to help you with this task, you found it. The Author wrote a few and they flow right into each other… Very well written.

Having had experience with Industrial Control Systems (ICS) and their security, I approached the book as a review – been there done that I thought. Instead, after re-visiting the history of how ICS evolved to its current insecure state, I found myself engaged in a mystery. How the structure of an ICS attack progressed from a seemingly innocent email to the potential of malicious control over the entire facility. The conversational prose of this page turner made me acutely aware that my prior experience was insufficient per the deep skills and knowledge needed to mount an effective defense. That unease was quickly remedied. The chapters that followed provided details, references, step-by-step procedures, and suggested deep learning while documenting how to secure and protect an ICS and develop an ongoing Cybersecurity program.The epiphany for me was that Cybersecurity has to become ingrained in the corporate culture similar to Safety. The Electrical and Instrument technicians of tomorrow need the knowledge Industrial Cybersecurity can provide. Industrial Cybersecurity is a perfect text. It’s depth of detail and the well defined lab exercises would readily establish the basis of an advanced course.George R. Clark

Very fine overview of a complex set of topics dealing with both IT and OT. The book is useful in that it provides terms of art, and contexts for industrial cyber security topics. The only glaring issues are the absence of both incident response and forensics post intrusion. Get this book if you are getting in the industrial cyber business

Fantastic resource. A must have for vets and people interested in Industrial Cybersecurity.Although geared towards technical professionals, it is written so well that all interested in OT,ICS,SCADA cyber security would benefit. For further insight, I am involved in the space but not from a technical standpoint and I cannot out the book down. Highly recommend!

Pascal does an excellent job of detailing the risk in IACS and then provides details on proper mitigation techniques.

This book provides a wealth of valuable information for Cybersecurity professionals with IT-only experience, control system engineers who are delving into security, or it could serve as a good reference for seasoned Industrial Control System (ICS) Security Engineers and Consultants. The practical, hands-on approach utilized in this book makes it accessible to newcomers in this field, thereby allowing them to gain a solid foundation of the ICS security concepts through lab related exercises. Given the criticality of most ICS production environments, an aspiring ICS security engineer simply does not have the luxury of learning through experimentation within a production environment (due to the potential of disrupting process operations and causing real-world implications). Therefore, the demonstration based learning approach utilized in this book offers an effective means of solidifying security concepts and evaluating distinct behaviors or ICS-specific protocols using packet analysis tools such as Wireshark.Although no single book can cover the vast amount of knowledge that is required to design and implement secure ICS systems, I think this book provides a sound primer and multi-tiered design approach to address ICS security holistically in the face of many dynamic cyber threats. As an ICS Security Consultant myself, I am pleased with the breadth of information contained in this book and how the author shared his security knowledge and experience in a practical way. The ICS community of security professionals is relatively small when compared to the overall number of professionals within the Cyber Security discipline. However, though knowledge sharing and dissemination of content such as this book, I think we will continue to make progressive steps forward to safeguard ICS assets and minimize the potential of businesses being severely impacted by security vulnerabilities.

This is a very well written book on a subject that should be of interest to any network and security professional as well as engineers in charge of manufacturing plants and critical infrastructure systems. We are all aware of recent security breaches at companies who supposed to be at the leading edge of security. Now imagine a typical manufacturing plant or public utility system with network infrastructure and technologies years behind and not enough knowledgeable people to support.I think this book can help to educate about industrial security problems, and more importantly show concrete steps, methods and tools to improve the situation. It also shows some of the inherent limitations of the industrial systems and why you cannot secure them in the same way (or as quickly) as IT systems. A lot of details and practical examples.I liked chapter 4 the most (Risk assessment), gives you tools to select and prioritize risk mitigations. Chapter 3 (example of an attack) is just fun to read! Chapter 2 goes pretty deep into ICS protocols details - security by obscurity is not valid argument, don't need to be a foreign government agent to hack these things. A lot of attention is paid to concepts of segmentation and zone security as well as defense in depth.Overall I must say this is a great book for any security professional as well as control engineers and plant managers.