Industrial Control Systems

Critical infrastructure (CI) across all sectors depend on control systems for safe and efficient operation. Advancing the security and resilience of industrial control systems (ICS) is one of CISA’s top priorities. As the lead federal agency responsible for helping CI partners manage ICS security risk, we partner with government and industry to deploy the technologies and practices that will guard critical infrastructure from the threats of today, while building innovative capabilities to defend against emerging threats on the horizon.

CISA’s Industrial Control Systems Priorities and Goals 

The security of industrial control systems is among the most important aspects of our collective effort to defend cyberspace. As ever, CISA remains committed to working with the industrial control systems (ICS) community to address both urgent operational cyber events and long-term ICS risk.

While the ICS risk landscape evolves, this truth remains: the only way the nation can permanently shift the cybersecurity advantage to ICS cyber defenders is through collective action.

Building on CISA’s “Securing Industrial Control systems: A Unified Initiative,” published in 2020, CISA’s efforts to reduce cyber risk to control systems center around four core priorities.

• We must defend ICS environments against the most urgent threats.
• Find and defeat adversaries before they cause harm. CISA and its partners will work together to improve visibility in OT environments so that we identify and defeat malicious activity quickly before it causes wide-spread harm.
• We must equip critical infrastructure owners and operators and cyber defenders with the technologies and tools required to dramatically raise adversary time, costs, and technical barriers.
• Finally, we must sustain operational resilience by addressing systemic weaknesses to better enable control systems to withstand cyber incidents with minimal impact to critical infrastructure.

With those priorities in mind, here are 3 goals we’re working on:

• Goal #1:  CISA will encourage broad adoption and use of the final Cross-Sector Cybersecurity Performance Goals – or CPG – published in October 2022. The voluntary CPGs apply to IT and OT owners across all critical infrastructure sectors and will, when implemented, significantly reduce risk to their enterprises and national security more broadly.  
  • Over the course of 2023, CISA will be working directly with stakeholders to develop Sector-Specific Goals designed to address each sector's specific cybersecurity risk in a more tailored fashion. 

• Goal #2: CISA is significantly investing in our ICS workforce, especially technical experts. That means we’re hiring! Come work with us!
• Goal #3: CISA will continue to collaborate cross-agency and with industry to track, detect, analyze, and respond to novel threats.

CISA’s ICS Offerings  

CISA offers a wide range of free products and services to support the ICS community's cybersecurity security risk management efforts. Visit this full catalog of all CISA ICS Service Offerings with additional details for each service listed. 

Assessment Services 

• Cybersecurity Assessments: Vulnerability Scanning, Remote Penetration Testing, and more 
• Exercises: Testing and readiness for ICS incidents 
• Strategic Risk Analysis: Provide ICS risk information pertaining to National Critical Functions (NCFs) 

Threat Hunting and Incident Response 

• Threat Hunting: Helping partners search for adversary activity in the absence of confirmed threats, and conducting activities pertaining to new vulnerabilities, and behavioral characteristics of emergent malware 
• Incident Response: Providing incident response support and forensic analysis to victims of ICS-related attacks 

Partnerships and Engagement

• Industrial Control Systems Joint Working Group (ICSJWG) 
• CISA Regional Cybersecurity Support  
• Follow CISA ICS on Twitter  

Technical Products and Services 

• Stuff Off Search (SOS): Use these guides to help identify your ICS (or other) assets on the public internet
• Cybersecurity Evaluation Tool (CSET): A tool for performing guided cybersecurity assessments of an organization's ICS 
• Control Environment Laboratory Resource (CELR): A simulated environment for cybersecurity research on operational technology 
• Contact CELR
• Malcolm: An open-source network traffic analysis tool 
• ICS Network Parsers: Open-source ICS protocol parsers for Zeek 
• Technical (Media) Analysis: Analysis of malware, digital media, and ICS hardware 
• Training: Technical and non-technical ICS instruction for all skill levels 

Information Exchange 

• ICS Advisories 
• ICS Cybersecurity Threat Intelligence Sharing
• ICS Cybersecurity Best Practices 

Vulnerability Coordination and Disclosure 

• CISA’s Coordinated Vulnerability Disclosure Process 
• VINCE: CISA’s platform for reporting, validating, and disclosing (ICS) vulnerabilities 
• Known Exploited Vulnerabilities: A list of vulnerabilities exploited by threat actors that should be remediated