Industrial systems and operational technology (OT) have become crucial components of modern living.
Unfortunately, the growing danger from hackers is now posing a serious problem for OT systems. Additionally, safety-critical controls are being attacked. These can result in major harm and injuries.
Finding the weak places in your security system may not be an easy chore, but your company’s security is only as strong as its weakest link. To counter new security risks, it is crucial to carry out security inspections and security surveys often.
What Is an Industrial Security Survey?
An Industrial security survey is a thorough examination of an industry’s facilities and systems. An industrial security survey should include the following three main goals:
- Measuring the level of security that is already in place,
- Identifying and quantifying any security plan flaws, and
- Figuring out how much protection is necessary.
After the industrial security survey is finished, there should be enough data to formulate suggestions. These suggestions will be used for enhancing the present security program. Only specialists with substantial expertise in conducting these surveys should conduct security audits.
A security audit is a continuous process. At the absolute least, it should be done annually. By doing this, you’ll make sure that your security precautions are enough for your needs and be able to adjust them as needed.
A successful industrial survey can be conducted following these six procedures:
- Figure out who will take part in the survey
- Select the type of survey (mail, online, or in-person)
- Create the survey’s questions and structure
- Send out the survey
- Examine the comments
- Report the findings
The Top 7 Reasons to Conduct an Industrial Security Survey
An industrial security survey examines the workplace, key personnel, and assets of your business. It also helps assess its susceptibility to threats and dangers. Security audits are crucial because they enable you to safeguard your most vital assets. More importantly, security surveys may soothe your mind and the thoughts of your employees and shareholders.
Conducting a security study is a need if you want to safeguard your company’s future. Here are a few reasons why conducting a security survey is necessary.
1. To Help Eliminate Liability Risk
Several implications occur as a result of a security breach. A security breach can result to employee injury, revenue loss, damage to brand reputation, and loss of intellectual property, among all others.
By conducting an industrial security survey, you are confident that you’ve covered all the stops. An industrial security survey can guarantee that you have taken all reasonable precautions to secure your personnel. This can help reduce the possibility that you will be held accountable in the event of a break-in or other security breach
2. To Help Organizations Understand How to Secure Their OT Environment
Through industrial security surveys, organizations may discover ways to deal with OT cyber risks. OT systems are now more vulnerable to the same disruptive risks that affect other internet-connected equipment. Other risks include intellectual property theft, dstributed denial of service (DDoS) botnets, and ransomware attacks, as a result of the industrial sector’s use of the internet.
Some OT cyber security guides are recommended after conducting industrial surveys. An OT cyber security guide helps industries maintain control of all physical assets. This helps assure their constant, secure functioning.
Some of the OT cyber security guides and methods to deal with OT cyber risks are discussed below.
- Software Vulnerability Analysis: Organizations must be aware of OT system software updates. Understanding potential weak spots also requires doing vulnerability scanning.
- Patching Management: The maintenance of hardware and software includes patching. Organizations need to be aware of the assets’ patching requirements. Because OT patching is a complicated procedure, it needs to be handled carefully.
- Backup Management: The best method to recover from data loss is via data backups. Backups must be periodically performed by organizations. To guarantee that backups are secure, there are several backup procedures and best practices.
3. To Help Guarantee Asset Security
A digital device that is a part of an OT infrastructure is referred to as an OT asset. Numerous OT assets, such as OT networks, operate on platforms that are out of date or incapable of supporting endpoint agents or other security tools. By conducting an industrial security survey, security teams will have unprecedented degrees of insight into these vital assets such as OT networks’, computers, and software systems.
Asset security assessment can also assist you to make sure the money you’ve spent on security is being used as effectively as feasible.
4. To Ensure Employee Safety
Employee safety is another advantage of industrial security surveys. Weak staff safety measures are identified by the threats that experienced security experts evaluate during a security audit. To ensure the security of your workers’ assets, as well as their safety, security solutions may be required.
Effective and efficient work requires a sense of safety and security in the workplace. Even if no suggestions are given as a result of the security inspection, you and your staff will benefit from knowing that your facility is safe.
5. To Help Determine Cyber Risk in the OT Environment
Regularly doing a security survey will help find any vulnerabilities in security systems. Security systems should adapt as security threats and the assets that need to be protected do. Regular security audits will help you identify gaps in your present system.
Some OT security concerns listed below give a general overview of the most prevalent threats to OT.
- Malware penetration through external hardware: USB flash drives are often utilized in organizations. This poses a threat to OT systems and ICS networks.
- IoT botnets and Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) assaults: In today’s connected world, the use of IoT devices is fast rising. This results in the threat of botnet DDoS assaults. These devices are “recruited” into botnets and exploited to launch DDoS assaults.
- Compromising cloud components: Redundancy is a key feature of cloud-based systems. These components are linked to local production, so asset owners have little influence over their security. This creates OT cloud security risks. Such risks can hamper connectivity between local production and outsourced (cloud) components.
6. To Help Lower Insurance
Security assessments and surveys can assist companies in lowering their insurance costs. It does this by reducing risk. It reduces risk through ensuring employee safety and guaranteeing asset security and eliminating liability risks.
After implementing a survey, insurance brokers can re-evaluate the risks of your company. These may result in a cheaper insurance price.
Conclusion
It is important to make sure that your security system is successful. The best and most efficient approach to achieve this is to conduct an industrial security survey. This sufficiently makes it important for your business to obtain a security survey.
