Hardening for ICS - Secudea bv

Hardening is one of the various ways to protect your systems and environment from attacks. Being it remote or insider threats that you are protecting against. However, with the ever-increasing connectivity between different IT and industrial environments for data transfer to the business, for remote access or for integration between different industrial environments these systems and environments are more and more exposed to several threats. Therefore, additional protective measures need to be deployed to these systems and environments. Next to patching and the like, hardening is a way or reducing risks for the environment, but it takes a well-thought approach and actions to be performed.

Hardening is not only part of the security best practices but is also (lightly) enforced through policies and standards. That is why the links and references towards the IEC62443 are going to be highlighted in the workshop.

This training will give the student insights on the various aspects of a hardening process, the ins and outs of hardening will be explained, how to perform hardening, why the concerned hardening settings are important and what to strengthen to reduce potential attack vectors. Potential consequences of the taken hardening steps will be explained and students will be guided towards creating a (basic) hardening script and system policies to assist in doing the actual hardening for similar systems within their environments. The potential pitfalls you might run into while performing hardening of standalone or domain-joined systems will be explained as well.

The training covers operating systems such as Windows 10/11 and Windows Server (as it is the most used operating system to provide Human Machine Interfaces to operators) but also Linux elements, network components security and industrial control system devices will be explained. Attendees will understand after the workshop how to verify hardening using common security tools and will understand what steps are to be taken for the hardening of systems and environments. Through real-world scenario-based exercises, attendees will get a thorough understanding of what can and should be done to protect their industrial environments.