Applying Cybersecurity

Cybersecurity is a very hot topic and is becoming increasingly important, not just from an economic perspective but also from a political and social perspective. The economic impact of cybersecurity is easy to understand: if information technology infrastructure is compromised in some way, it is logical to expect some kind of economic impact. What is not so apparent is the importance that cyber security has from a political and social perspective. The Cambridge Analytica scandal is representative of the importance of cybersecurity from a political perspective. In this case, the personal data of several million Facebook users was used, or at least was attempted to be used, to influence the US elections. If you take a look at international airports, the fights they are battling are now more to do with cyberwars than traditional conflicts. Many companies manage and own tons of personal data. Analysis of this issue would require a book in itself and is beyond the scope of this book, but it is important to bear this in mind when talking about cybersecurity and data protection.

In an industrial environment, cybersecurity relates to business continuity and intellectual property. This chapter will discuss the I-IoT data flow from a cybersecurity perspective, restricting the analysis to the industrial control system and the I-IoT data flow described in the previous chapter. We will discuss what it means to have a cyber strategy and how this applies in the industrial environment. We will also outline the Defense in Depth (DiD) approach. In order to better understand the architecture for segregating the control network and securing the I-IoT data flow, we will also provide some relevant information about firewalls.

In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

• What is the DiD strategy?
• Firewalls and their classes
• Common architectures for securing control networks
• How to secure the I-IoT data flow