Efficient Plant January 2018 - 20

feature | operational strategies

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ABOUT
THE
EXPERTS

MILLE GANDELSMAN is CTO of Indegy,
New York, where he leads the company's
technology research and product
development. Prior to Indegy, he led
engineering efforts for Stratoscale
and spent several years managing
cybersecurity research for Israel's elite
intelligence corps. Gandelsman is an IDF
Talpiot graduate with more than 15 years
of experience in ICS and cybersecurity.

YARIV LENCHNER is director of
product management for Indegy,
New York. He is an expert in ICS,
VoIP, IP networking, and call-center
technologies. Lenchner has held
technical management positions at
CyberArc, Nice Systems,
and RiT Technologies.

threats in real-time or even post attack.
Gandelsman and Lenchner note that it's
important to carefully consider these threats
and look into security controls that will help
prevent and detect such threats before they
take down operational processes and critical
services.
The ICS cybersecurity skills gap will
continue to grow. While the shortage of
skilled ICS cybersecurity professionals isn't
a new concern, the skills gap continues to
grow. Despite awareness of the need for
ICS cybersecurity, countless organizations
struggle to develop a strategy and place
skilled professionals in key roles.
Many, in fact, are still debating who
should be responsible for ICS security:

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Should it be the IT security operations
center (SOC) team, which is familiar with
cybersecurity best practices, yet lacks the
understanding of operational technologies
and their requirements? Or the operational team that knows and understands OT,
but isn't familiar with cybersecurity best
practices and is already over tasked with
the demanding work of maintaining and
ensuring operational safety, reliability, and
continuity?
According to Gandelsman and Lenchner,
the successful deployment of industrial cybersecurity projects must leverage resources
from IT and OT. Business-level oversight
and leadership helps ensure that the two
sides will collaborate effectively.

THE GOOD NEWS
Awareness of OT security gaps has been
growing. In 2017, more organizations
implemented ICS security solutions and in-

tegrated them with existing SOC tools, such
as SIEM (Security Information and Event
Management)) and incident-management
systems than in previous years.
As Gandelsman and Lenchner wrote, the
increase in security alerts generated from
ICS environments is raising awareness
among IT and executive management of
the critical security gaps that need to be
addressed in these environments.
Cybersecurity protection is critical for
industrial-building management/automation systems.
Buildings are typically not considered
critical infrastructure, yet they house operations such as data centers and healthcare
and government services. Building-management systems/building-automation
systems (BMS/BAS) centralize a wide range
of important control functions and services,
including HVAC, lighting, water and
wastewater management, fire-suppression
systems, closed-circuit television (CCTV),
and access control.
Since modern BMS/BAS systems are
often connected to the corporate network
and the internet to enable remote control
and management, they, too, are exposed to
cyberthreats. Gandelsman and Lenchner
caution that such systems, similar to many
industrial systems, haven't been designed

JANUARY 2018
http://www.EFFICIENTPLANTMAG.COM
Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Efficient Plant January 2018
