Overview
Many organizations lack tailored incident response capabilities for their OT environments. With IT/OT convergence, cyber incidents in OT can lead to extended downtime, safety hazards, environmental impact, and reputational damage. Our joint IT/OT CIRP ensures you’re prepared to respond effectively across both domains.
Why Define an OT Incident Response Process?
OT asset downtime directly hits your bottom line—and in many plants, can threaten human safety and the environment. A clear, outcome-focused IR plan equips you to detect, contain, and recover swiftly, preventing catastrophic failures.
By analyzing real-world scenarios—like ransomware hitting a critical safety controller—you focus remediation where it truly matters, rather than implementing controls for compliance alone.
Key Benefits
- Faster Mitigation: Predefined steps cut response times, limiting attacker dwell time.
- Organized Response: Clear roles, responsibilities, and playbooks for crisis situations.
- Strengthened Security: IR planning forces a comprehensive review of assets, controls, and gaps.
- Stakeholder Confidence: Proactive measures build trust with customers, partners, and regulators.
- Regulatory Compliance: Supports NIS2, NERC-CIP and other critical infrastructure mandates.
Seven Phases of OT Incident Response
- Preparation: Establish IR team, roles, tools and security controls.
- Identification: Continuous monitoring to detect anomalies and potential incidents.
- Containment: Isolate affected systems or zones to prevent lateral spread.
- Eradication: Remove root causes—malware, unauthorized access, vulnerabilities.
- Recovery: Restore systems using backups and hardened configurations.
- Lessons Learned: Conduct post-incident review to document improvements.
- Continuous Improvement: Update IR plans, procedures and training based on new threats.
Deliverables
- Review of existing IR policies, procedures, network architectures, configurations
- Stakeholder interviews and role clarification
- Tailored incident simulations, tabletop exercises, and real-world scenarios
- Remote support, after-action reports and recommended next steps