Cyber Security challenges and Issues of Industrial Control Systems - Some Security Recommendations

Industrial control systems (ICS) are used to monitor and to control a variety of critical infrastructures that provide electricity, water, transportation, manufacturing and other essential services. The growing integration of IT technologies into ICS to support enterprise connectivity as well as remote access capabilities has exposed them to a wide range of security issues. In this article, we highlight that addressing these issues is a great challenge because there are no specific security solutions designed exclusively for ICS. In addition, we point out that it is difficult to implement existing conventional security measures at the ICS to address these security issues and that it is due to the differences between traditional IT systems and the ICS in terms of both security constraints and security requirements. Therefore, in order to improve ICS security posture, a list of recommendations and best practices has been proposed at the end.