I will be speaking at the 19th Annual API Cybersecurity Conference November 12, 2024. The other speakers in our OT/ICS session are Saltanat Mashirova from Honeywell and Jonathan Boyett from Phillips 66. My presentation will be “Process Sensor Monitoring for Cyber Security, Reliability, and Safety”. Seven years ago, I gave a 4-hour short course on control system cyber security at the API Conference. The responses from the network security attendees were “we wished our engineers were here”. My presentation affects both the engineers and network security personnel and addresses a critical part of OT cyber security and process safety that is often not addressed. As a colleague stated “I have spent years talking to brick walls and brick heads about the lack of security in field devices. Their response is typically that they are air-gapped and that everything is safe and secure. Irrational fantasy at best. I am not alone in this quest, but I am definitely in a minority.” Russia, Iran, and China have demonstrated knowledge of the gap in cyber security of process sensors. Conversely monitoring the health of process sensors at the physics level provides an independent “ground truth” validation of OT network monitoring systems.
