Critical Infrastructure Cybersecurity Fundamentals

Critical Infrastructure organizations are undergoing digital transformation, digitizing processes, and adopting Internet of Things (IoT) technology to improve efficiency and reliability. The resulting connectivity of operational technology (OT) to the internet and the convergence between OT and IT have created extreme efficiencies, but also new vulnerabilities and exposure to cybersecurity threats. As the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) noted in a joint alert, cyber actors are demonstrating “their continued willingness to conduct malicious cyber activity against Critical Infrastructure by exploiting internet-accessible OT assets.” And these cyberattacks are growing in their size, sophistication, and prevalence. Many of the principles for defending your IT environment apply to industrial control systems (ICS), supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) systems and other OT. To help shortcut your learning, we’ve created this resource guide with more than 80 useful reference links, categorized and described around the following concepts: