Steps To Reduce Industrial Cybersecurity Risks

                                

22nd  May, 2025.

In this post, we will see the steps to reduce industrial cybersecurity risks.

In industrial automation, IoT is the next generation system and is taking the system to new high levels. Most of the big industrial systems today are IoT enabled. But, as IoT involves a lot of networking, it also brings along the risk of security. Networks can be hacked or corrupted deliberately, and if done, then can hamper the whole system performance. This introduces the need to protect the system from such risks and make cybersecurity more stringent to operate. In this post, we will see the steps to reduce industrial cybersecurity risks. 

Why there is a need to reduce industrial cybersecurity risks?

First of all, let us understand why we need to reduce the risks involved in cybersecurity. Imagine you have a big petroleum refining facility, which is operational fully 24 hours and is very critical in functionality. You cannot afford to shutdown the plant for even a minute, or endanger the environment around, as it can result in great financial and personal losses. Now, you have also this plant connected on IoT level, communicating all data with cloud servers. What if the network is hacked? You can imagine what level of damage can be done if this cybersecurity is not secured. We will now see below why this risk needs to be eliminated:

1. Loss in finance 

2. Loss in personal lives or damage to the nearby environment 

3. As it is unpredictable and you don't know how frequently this downtime will occur, it will result in a more increased downtime, resulting in increased maintenance activities. So, you cannot restore the system easily as required.

4. Apart from downtime, hacking can also work in a reverse way by changing the set parameters which are irrelevant for plant operations. This will result in a very hazardous situation for the industry, due to unsafe conditions.

5. As your network has been tampered, the critical data like documents, design, configurations and current data can be stolen or manipulated. 

6. Because your cybersecurity has been disrupted, it increases doubts about your technical functionality, resulting in either loss of functional license, damage to reputation, or increase in legal actions. Overall, the burden on the business increases due to all these hurdles. 

Guide to industrial cybersecurity risk management:

1. Assessing the security conditions regularly:

You know that your network and security can be breached anytime and taken advantage of. Instead of waiting for something to happen, you can pre test the system yourself by hacking the system performance at your end. You can scan the network health and perform regular audits of the network system. You can exploit weak or default passwords, attempt unauthorized access or use ICS (industry control system) specific exploitation tools for testing the vulnerabilities. Once done, you can then perform an analysis and check what are the weak areas. Document them properly with criticality levels and present it to IT and OT teams for performance evaluation.

2. Divide the network into various segments:

A single network always creates major issues. Rather, you should split the network into various small divisions and simplify. A network issue then can limit your problem to that network only, rather than affecting the whole network. You can split your IT network by firewalls, industrial data diodes ( which allows only stringent one way communication), managed switches, demilitarized zones, or VLAN. You can split the OT by various levels - L1 as field devices, L2 as PLC, L3 as SCADA and L4 as ERP, MES or cloud. Due to this, your whole network will not be compromised, and improves performance and reliability to a great extent. 

3. Protect your data with encryption and taking regular backup:

The most basic step in cybersecurity is to protect your data with strong passwords. Using weak or default passwords can expose more to hacking. Then, once data has been encrypted, make sure to take their backup on a regular basis. In that case, even if your data is lost or misguided, you have the last running data on your server. This can be loaded then and used afterwards. For more redundancy, make a provision to store it automatically into some other location too, making multiple copies of the same data. 

4. Building a cyber incident response plan:

As cybersecurity incidents are critical in nature, it is important to report them as soon as possible. According to international standards, certain strict timelines have been defined which the company should follow. Within this time frame, the company should immediately report the incident. For this, it is necessary to define a set of precise roles and responsibilities, for who will perform this task specifically. This ensures that only a certain set of skilled workforce will do this job, increasing reliability and accuracy.

5. Regularly training your staff:

Perhaps the most common issue for anything is human error. Cybersecurity is a complex thing, which can obviously make an engineer make mistakes. For this reason, it is required that your concerned staff is briefed and trained on a regular basis. Also, they must be updated on time with any progress happening, so that they stay on par with the technology. Ask them to frequently update software and firmware whenever available. But this update must first be raised with the critical level team, so that they are able to guide the other workers and implement them without any fail.

6. Application limitation and deploying honeytoken equipment:

Now, this is a very advanced method and proves very effective. Allow only the required applications to be installed in SCADA or MES / Cloud server PC. This prevents any unauthorized installations and blocks malware at the very first place. It requires support of the IT team to do the settings. 

The next method is honeytoken. This involves installing dummy automation systems like SCADA PC or PLC, with weak or default passwords which will be easy to hack. If that system is corrupted, then an alarm can be raised immediately, indicating that your network can be tampered and necessary steps must now be taken. 

7. Implementing behaviour based AI systems:

Artificial intelligence is very useful nowadays and you can use the same for cybersecurity risk prevention. Some models like Nozomi and Clarity study the behaviour pattern of the system like operator actions, commands given, network hampering, monitoring power consumption patterns, etc. Due to this, it will predict the outcome and warn for any tampered action.

I have covered the steps to reduce industrial cybersecurity risks. I have also not attempted to cover all the topics related to it, as it can vary from case to case. Once you are familiar with this type of technology, you can easily troubleshoot any issues related to it.

Thank you for reading the post. I hope you liked it and will find a new way in this type of technology.