Credit: CTL

NIST researchers Timothy Zimmerman, Michael Pease, and Michael Powell, with MITRE staff, hosted a  webinar with over 100 participants regarding their project, Responding to and Recovering from a Cyber Attack: Cybersecurity for the Manufacturing Sector. 

The NIST team is currently in the process of demonstrating an approach for responding to and recovering from cyber events on manufacturing sector operational technology (OT) environments. Industry partners on the project include: Amazon Web Services, Cisco, Dragos, Garland Technology, Inductive Automation, Qcor, Rockwell Automation, Siemens, TDI Technologies, and Tenable.

Constant threats of destructive malware, insider threats, and even operator errors require manufacturers to be able to respond to and quickly recover from a cyber event that impacts OT, industrial control systems, and plant operations. The project will demonstrate approaches for responding to and recovering from several cyber events similar to those within the manufacturing sector by leveraging common cybersecurity capabilities: event reporting, log review, event analysis, and incident handling and response.

The project is in the build phase and is currently being implemented in the National Cybersecurity Center of Excellence (NCCoE) manufacturing laboratory, located in Rockville, Maryland, USA. The lab contains a discrete manufacturing workcell that emulates a common manufacturing process, including an automated assembly process, robotic arm for machine-tending, industrial networking, and supporting equipment typically utilized to support OT environments.

The result will be a freely available NIST Cybersecurity Practice Guide that includes a reference design and a detailed description of the practical steps needed to implement the solution based on the NIST Cybersecurity Framework and industry standards and best practices.