Protecting Industrial Control Systems from Electronic Threats

This book is meant to help both the novice and expert in Information Technology (IT) security and industrial control systems (ICS) gain a better understanding of protecting ICSs from electronic threats. The term "ICS" was chosen as ICSs include Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA), Distributed Control Systems (DCS), Programmable Logic Controllers (PLCs), Remote Terminal Units (RTUs), Intelligent Electronic Devices (IEDs), field controllers, sensors, and drives, emission controls, building controls including fire suppression, thermostats, and elevator controls, and meters including business and residential automated metering. For the purpose of this book, ICSs also include safety systems. The term "electronic threats" was chosen rather than cyber security because there are electronic threats to ICSs beyond traditional cyber threats. Additionally, the book is about protecting the mission of the ICS - a compromise of a computer that isn't critical to the mission of the control system may be a cyber security event, but it is not of importance. The term "protecting" was chosen as this not a book on how to attack control systems. From a cyber perspective, they are very brittle and attacking them is not rocket science. On the other hand, protecting them while at the same time maintaining their mission can be rocket science. The term "it takes a village" can be applied to securing ICSs as Operations alone cannot do this. It takes a team of ICS expertise, IT security expertise, telecom knowledge, networking, ICS and IT vendor support, and most of all senior management support to make this work. I hope you find the book of interest. Respectfully, Joe