A recent Forbes article, 7 Steps Utilities Must Take To Protect Critical Facilities From Cyber Attacks, highlights focus areas for manufacturers and producers to strengthen their operational resilience.

These seven steps include:

1. Knowing What You Need To Protect: Build A Complete Asset Inventory
2. Focusing On What Matters: Prioritize Cybersecurity By Real Consequences
3. Closing The Gaps: Conduct Regular Vulnerability Scans And Patch Management
4. Limiting Attacker Movements: Segment Networks To Contain Threats
5. Detecting And Reacting: Monitor In Real Time And Build An Incident Response Plan
6. Training Your People: Build A Cyber-Aware Culture
7. Designing With Security In Mind: Build Cybersecurity Into New Projects

It’s crucial to have essential technologies and a cybersecurity-focused culture that is as deeply embedded as safety cultures.

For power, water, and wastewater companies, Emerson offers an ICS cybersecurity solution, Power and Water Cybersecurity Suite, that helps these companies secure their critical DCS and SCADA systems for compliance with NERC Critical Infrastructure Protection (CIP) and other regulations.

The suite enhances protection by including modules to counter threats and protect network integrity. These modules include:

• Real-time antivirus protection guards workstations and servers against viruses and malware.
• Application control effectively mitigates malware threats.
• Device control to secure and centralize management of storage devices associated with Windows-based workstations and servers.
• An agent-based solution to determine patch needs within workstations and servers.

From a proactive monitoring perspective, modules within the suite continuously monitor systems for emerging threats and implement remediation tactics to keep information secure. The network is continuously monitored for rogue or unmanaged devices that can be converted to managed clients by the user. Network intrusion detection monitors data traffic. All security incidents and events across the network are collected for further analysis.

The suite includes these modules:

• Antivirus protection
• Application control
• Configuration management
• Cybersecurity Suite dashboard
• Device control
• Patch management
• Rogue system detection
• Security incident & event management
• System backup & recovery
• Vulnerability assessment

The experienced Emerson team can help you strengthen your resilience with ICS Cybersecurity Services to deliver plant- and fleet-wide cybersecurity products and services supporting NERC CIP compliance and industry standards like the NIST cybersecurity framework, ISA99, and IEC 62443.