RISK ASSESSMENT

OT RISK ASSESSMENT

OT Risk Assessment Services

Operational Technology (OT) systems are the backbone of modern industry, overseeing and managing essential processes. However, these systems are increasingly becoming targets for cybercriminals, making OT risk management crucial to identify and mitigate potential vulnerabilities through comprehensive risk assessment processes.

CNB provides extensive IEC 62443 compliance risk assessment services, accurately pinpointing cybersecurity risks within your OT environment. Our risk assessment services encompass:

Identification of assets comprising the OT environment under review.
Identification and segmentation of these assets into security zones and conduits.
Business Impact Assessment (BIA) to ascertain critical OT assets.
Identification and analysis of threat sources/actors and relevant scenarios.
Evaluation of existing (as-is) controls.
Identification and assessment of gaps and vulnerabilities.
Evaluation of additional mitigating controls.
Risk rating, prioritization, and remedial recommendations.
Detailed assessment report.

Our assessments are “outcome-focused,” meaning that any remedial recommendations are designed to provide tangible risk reduction. This approach equips organizations with the necessary information to justify OT cybersecurity improvements and the associated costs, by understanding the “What, Why, and How?”

Moreover, our assessments adhere to industry best practices and standards/frameworks such as ISO/IEC 62443, ISO/IEC 27001, NIST, and ISF, but can also be tailored to meet your specific needs.

Our Consultancy Services Portfolio

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Comprehensive risk assessment services that accurately identify and prioritise OT cyber security risks with actionable remediation recommendations.

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OT Vulnerability Assessment

Baseline review of your OT environment security capabilities and weaknesses. Enables the mitigation of priority risks identified and the development of a long-term security strategy.

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OT Asset Inventory

Comprehensive asset discovery services that result in a complete view of your OT assets, systems and networks. Enables risk exposure evaluation and obsolescence management.

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Penetration Testing

We analyse attack vectors and non-disruptively test egress and ingress points to and from your OT systems and networks. Provides insight into operational impacts from a cyber compromise.

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OT Vulnerability Assessment

Technical assessment of an architecture where current security posture is considered, and any improvements identified. The focus is on establishing a defendable architecture.

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Regulatory Compliance

We support organisations in successfully navigating this evolving and complex space. Our guidance helps you become and remain compliant.

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Consultancy

We help you achieve your OT cyber security goals by providing advice and guidance based on actual real-world experience resulting in tangible OT cyber security advancement.

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Network Segmentation

The goal of our Network Segmentation service is to enhance security by stopping attacks from propagating throughout an OT network and penetrating vulnerable assets.

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OT Asset Hardening

The goal of our OT Asset Hardening service is to reduce security risk by eliminating potential attack vectors and condensing the environment’s attack surface.

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Training & Awareness

Educational programs and resources to help organisations understand, utilise, and defend against cyber threats using the MITRE ATT&CK framework.

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Capital Project Assurance

We ensure OT cyber security requirements are identified, embedded, deployed and verified at all stages of the capital project lifecycle.

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OT Cyber Security Program

We help deliver your program objectives on time and on budget. We offer full program management and deployment to tailored roles.

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OT Cyber Security Framework (OT-CSF)

We ensure your OT-CSF meets objectives but is also designed realistically and its procedural and technical requirements achievable and sustainable.

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Staff Augmentation

We provide clients with the capability to meet strategic objectives via our trusted, highly skilled and flexible resource pool.

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Incident Response

We identify the key cyber threat scenarios that need to be prepared and assist establish process and plans to ensure you can respond effectively and swiftly.

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Table Top Exercise (TTX)

Our TTX tests your organisations ability to respond to different cyber incident scenarios. It helps evaluate how effective your cyber incident response plans are.

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Digital Forensics Incident Recovery (DFIR)

We offer a complete DFIR service that enables your organisation to act decisively should a cyber incident occur.

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Malevolent Threat Actor Monitoring

We actively monitor the deep and dark web surface for “malevolent chatter” and alert you if there is a risk to your organisation’s OT assets and infrastructure.

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Why Conduct an OT Risk Assessment?

Conducting a cyber risk assessment provides a structured understanding of the risks present in your OT environment and the potential impact they could have on your organization, whether through malicious or non-malicious means.

The assessment process is outcome-focused, generating a “risk rating” for each worst-case threat scenario (also known as “Top-Event” or “Boom Event”). Each threat scenario is evaluated under the following conditions:

Without mitigating controls (inherent risk rating);
With current (as-is) mitigating controls (residual risk rating);
With additional mitigating controls (target risk rating).

Through thorough discovery and analysis, the effectiveness of existing controls for each threat scenario is evaluated. This evaluation may reveal that current controls sufficiently reduce the risk to an acceptable level, or that the risk is acceptable and requires no additional actions. Alternatively, it may identify vulnerabilities where enhancements or additional controls are necessary to bring the risk within organizational tolerance.

The assessment also considers “risk vs. benefits vs. cost and complexity,” enabling the pragmatic prioritization of remedial efforts. This approach focuses on items that offer the most significant risk reduction both tactically (short-term mitigations, often referred to as “low-hanging fruit”) and strategically (medium to long-term mitigations requiring more effort to plan, design, and implement).

Risk Ratings are typically derived using a 5 x 5 grid format known as a “Risk Assessment Matrix” (RAM). The RAM provides a straightforward and effective way to present a comprehensive view of cyber risks to all team members and key stakeholders. “Risk Tolerance” is the level of risk or uncertainty an organization can accept and varies significantly across industries. Many organizations develop their own RAMs, tailored to their specific consequence categories and likelihood scales based on historical data.

A high-level summary of the key steps in our risk assessment process is outlined and visualized below:

01: Discover: Identify Assets

Identify and catalog all assets within the OT environment.
Categorize OT assets based on their criticality to the organization’s operations (e.g., High, Medium, Low).

02: Discover: Identify Threats

Identify and prioritize threat scenarios that could lead to high-consequence events.
Consider all applicable real-world cyber scenarios seen across industries for completeness.

03: Analyze: Threats & Controls

Evaluate the effectiveness of existing (as-is) controls for each threat scenario.
Determine the risk rating for each threat scenario based on organizational impact and likelihood.

04: Analyze: Additional Controls

Identify additional controls that can provide tangible risk reduction for each threat scenario.
Ensure the controls are realistic and agree on an updated risk rating achievable with these additional controls.

05: Analyze: Prioritize Risk

Prioritize risks to determine which require immediate action, where to invest time and resources, and which risks can be addressed later.
Prioritization is based on the highest risk ratings in descending order.

06: Formalize: Create Report

Document the assessment in a formal report.
The report includes an executive summary, a description of the current situation, risk exposure, findings, observations, and recommendations.

07: Formalize: Readback

Conduct a high-level feedback session to provide an overview of the assessment outcome to executive-level stakeholders.
Plan the next steps and conclude the engagement.

Why is an OT-Specific Risk Assessment Necessary?

Traditional IT security models focus on Confidentiality first, then Integrity, and finally Availability (known as the “CIA Triad”). In contrast, OT cybersecurity models prioritize Availability first, followed by Integrity, and then Confidentiality (known as the “AIC Triad”).

This prioritization is due to the critical nature of OT environments, such as manufacturing plants and upstream oil assets, which rely heavily on continuous availability and dependable integrity for both process control and safety. In some scenarios, the loss of availability or system integrity could jeopardize the safety of the workforce, consumers, physical assets, and the environment. The type and duration of availability loss can lead to significant economic, ecological, and life-threatening consequences. Notable examples of availability attacks include the 2021 Colonial Pipeline attack, the 2019 Springhill Memorial Hospital ransomware attack, and the 2015 Sandworm attacks on Ukrainian critical infrastructure.

Understanding these differences between OT and IT environments is crucial for accurately assessing risks and recommending appropriate countermeasures. This highlights the importance of conducting an OT-specific risk assessment.

Key Benefits of Conducting an OT Risk Assessment

Gain insights into and benchmark your current risk exposure, along with the potential consequences of cyber-attacks.
Identify gaps in People, Processes, and Technology, helping to prioritize high-risk areas for remediation and improvement.
Supply supporting information to make informed decisions regarding cybersecurity investments.
Provide compliance evidence of cyber risk management to regulatory authorities.

Deliverables from an OT Risk Assessment

As part of this service offering, CNB provides a formal report that includes:

Assessment methodology
Executive summary
Description of the current situation, risk exposure, and potential consequences for the organization
Assessment findings and observations
Remediation recommendations with associated priorities

Additionally, the following items will also be provided:

High-level presentation for executive-level stakeholders
Any supporting materials produced during the assessment (e.g., risk assessment analysis worksheets, etc.)

What is OT Cyber Security?

OT Cyber Security refers to the specific practices and processes used to protect the Operational Technology (OT) systems that control industrial processes from cyber threats.

OT Cyber Security is critical for ensuring the safety and reliability of industrial processes, and involves the implementation of measures such as access control, network segmentation, encryption, and intrusion detection to name but a few.

What is OT Risk Management?

OT Risk Management involves the identification, assessment, and management of risks associated with Operational Technology (OT) systems. The goal of OT risk management is to ensure the safety and reliability of industrial processes by implementing appropriate security controls to manage the risks associated with cyber threats.

What are the Differences Between IT and OT Security?

One major constraint for industrial companies towards protecting industrial systems is a misunderstanding of the difference between IT and OT security. Here’s a rather simplistic way to think about it.

IT stores, retrieves, and transmits data whereas OT uses that data to monitor, control, and operate physical devices, processes, and events. In IT, the confidentiality of data is a key concern whereas in OT the safety of equipment and availability of processes is the main concern.

IT is dynamic, that it has many moving parts and it means that IT has an incredible number of exploit variants. Hence, IT incidents are more frequent. By contrast, OT has a lower number of gateways, making it comparatively safer. OT is engineered for prescribed actions based on content which means things only happen one way. If given a certain input, OT always produces a specific output again and again.

Another difference between IT and OT security concerns security patching. Since IT components progress so fast and have relatively short life spans, IT security updates happen frequently which doesn’t work the same way in OT. In fact, patching OT components can require complete shutdowns and are rarely updated. It is true that many OT systems are “insecure by design” and would be at risk from a sophisticated attacker even after vulnerability patching.

The differences outlined above make it clear that IT and OT have different security priorities and different goals for the maintenance of their systems. 80% of organisations surveyed see the expanding interconnectedness of OT and IT as a challenge. This is a result of the digitalisation of OT which can expose industrial systems that might not be properly secured to cyber threats.

Why does OT Cyber Security Matter?

As a society, we all depend on operational technology for a wide range of critical industrial processes. The growing costs of industrial machinery and the serious devastation that an attack could deliver for the economy are crucial factors to consider for organisations that want to boost the protection of their industrial networks.

Considering the increasing cybersecurity risk exposure, OT systems have become a more lucrative target. This interest is noticeable in the growing availability of exploit kits and new monetisation opportunities such as ransomware particularly developed to hack industrial systems.

What are the Three (3) Main OT Cyber Security Attack Vectors?

Network attack surface: it presents exposure related to ports, protocols, channels, services, network applications and firmware interfaces. Depending on the organisation’s infrastructure, cloud servers and data could also be included.

Software attack surface: its surface is comprised of the software environment and its interfaces. The software attack surface is calculated across a number of different types of code, such as applications, email services, configurations, databases, executables, web pages, mobile device OS, etc.

Human attack surface: one of the important strengths of highly secure organisations is their emphasis on delivering security awareness and safety principles to their employees, partners, supply chain and even their customers.

Why do Organisations Need OT Cyber Security Assessment in the First Place?

Assessing OT security risks will yield a number of benefits. Firstly, it will give a thorough understanding of various OT devices and their functionality. Secondly, this assessment will help the organisation discover threats to its OT environment and prioritise remediation efforts using a consequence-led approach.

What OT Cybersecurity Risk Assessment Methodologies are Commonly Used?

Detailed below are some Risk Assessment methodologies used for OT:

NIST Risk Management Framework (RMF): The NIST RMF is a framework that provides guidelines for managing the risks associated with information security. The framework is structured into six steps that include categorizing information and information systems, selecting and implementing security controls, assessing security control effectiveness, authorising information systems, monitoring security controls, and responding to security incidents.

ISA/IEC 62443: A series of standards that provide guidelines for the security of industrial automation and control systems. The standards include a methodology for conducting a security risk assessment that involves defining the scope of the assessment, identifying the assets and threats, analyzing the risks, and implementing the appropriate security controls.

FAIR: The Factor Analysis of Information Risk (FAIR) methodology is a quantitative risk analysis framework that provides a structured approach to identifying, analysing, and prioritising risks. The methodology involves identifying and quantifying the assets, threats, vulnerabilities, and impacts, and then calculating the risk by applying a set of standard formulas.

OCTAVE: Operationally Critical Threat, Asset, and Vulnerability Evaluation (OCTAVE) is a methodology that provides a structured approach to risk assessment and management. The methodology involves identifying the assets, threats, vulnerabilities, and impacts, and then developing a risk management plan to mitigate the identified risks.

STRIDE: STRIDE is a methodology used to identify and prioritise the security threats to a system. The methodology involves analysing the system for potential threats and then prioritising the risks based on their likelihood and impact.

The OT risk assessment methodology should be tailored to the specific requirements and risks of the organisation. The methodology should be flexible enough to incorporate the organisation’s unique requirements and should be periodically reviewed and updated to reflect changes in the threat landscape.

In addition to the above-mentioned methodologies, the use of automated risk assessment tools is becoming increasingly popular. Automated tools can help organisations to quickly identify vulnerabilities and risks and provide prioritised recommendations for remediation.

Some of the commonly used automated risk assessment tools (risk assessment technology) in the OT environment include Nozomi Networks, Claroty, Armis, Tenable Nessus and Rapid7.

Why is OT risk assessment important?

OT risk assessment is important for several reasons. Firstly, it helps organizations identify potential risks and vulnerabilities in their OT infrastructure, which is essential for effective risk management. Secondly, it enables organisations to prioritise their security investments based on the risks that pose the greatest threat to their OT systems. Finally, it helps organisations comply with various regulations and standards that require a comprehensive risk assessment of their OT infrastructure.

What are the key steps involved in conducting an OT risk assessment?

The key steps involved in conducting an OT risk assessment include:

Scoping: Defining the scope of the assessment, including the assets and systems that will be included in the assessment.
Threat identification: Identifying potential threats to the OT infrastructure, such as cyberattacks, natural disasters, and human error.
Vulnerability assessment: Assessing the vulnerabilities and weaknesses in the OT infrastructure that could be exploited by a threat.
Risk analysis: Analysing the likelihood and impact of potential risks to the OT infrastructure.
Risk evaluation: Evaluating the risks based on their likelihood and impact, and determining the appropriate risk management strategies.
Risk treatment: Developing and implementing strategies to mitigate the identified risks.
Monitoring and review: Monitoring the effectiveness of the risk management strategies and reviewing the risk assessment periodically to ensure it remains up-to-date.

What are some common challenges associated with conducting an OT risk assessment?

Some common challenges associated with conducting an OT risk assessment include:

Limited visibility: It can be difficult to identify all OT assets and systems, especially in large and complex environments.
Lack of expertise: Conducting an OT risk assessment requires specialized expertise in both OT and IT security, which can be difficult to find within an organization.
Rapidly evolving threats: The threat landscape for OT systems is constantly evolving, making it difficult to keep up with new and emerging threats.
Limited resources: Conducting an OT risk assessment can be time-consuming and resource-intensive, which can be a challenge for organizations with limited resources.

What are some best practices for conducting an OT risk assessment?

Some best practices for conducting an OT risk assessment include:

Engaging cross-functional teams: Bringing together teams with expertise in both OT and IT security can help ensure a comprehensive risk assessment.
Using automated tools: Automated tools can help identify and track OT assets and vulnerabilities, making the risk assessment process more efficient and accurate.
Prioritising critical assets: Critical assets should be given priority in the risk assessment process, as they pose the greatest risk to the organization.
Regularly reviewing the assessment: The assessment should be reviewed periodically to ensure it remains up-to-date and reflects changes in the OT infrastructure.
Ensuring senior management support: OT risk assessment should be supported by senior management to ensure the necessary resources are allocated and the risk management strategies are effectively implemented.

OT RISK ASSESSMENT

OT Risk Assessment Services

Our Consultancy Services Portfolio

Risk Assessment

OT Vulnerability Assessment

OT Asset Inventory

Penetration Testing

OT Vulnerability Assessment

Regulatory Compliance

Consultancy

Network Segmentation

OT Asset Hardening

Training & Awareness

Capital Project Assurance

OT Cyber Security Program

OT Cyber Security Framework (OT-CSF)

Staff Augmentation

Incident Response

Table Top Exercise (TTX)

Digital Forensics Incident Recovery (DFIR)

Malevolent Threat Actor Monitoring

Why Conduct an OT Risk Assessment?

Why is an OT-Specific Risk Assessment Necessary?

Key Benefits of Conducting an OT Risk Assessment

Deliverables from an OT Risk Assessment

What is OT Cyber Security?

What is OT Risk Management?

What are the Differences Between IT and OT Security?

Why does OT Cyber Security Matter?

What are the Three (3) Main OT Cyber Security Attack Vectors?

Why do Organisations Need OT Cyber Security Assessment in the First Place?

What OT Cybersecurity Risk Assessment Methodologies are Commonly Used?

Why is OT risk assessment important?

What are the key steps involved in conducting an OT risk assessment?

What are some common challenges associated with conducting an OT risk assessment?

What are some best practices for conducting an OT risk assessment?

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