Compliance

NERC CIP
North American Electric Reliability Corporation's Critical Infrastructure Protection

NEI 08-09
Nuclear Energy Institute

WIB (Dutch acronym)
International Instrument Users’ Association
Plant Security Working Group

Patch Management
Patching refers to the process required to address known weaknesses in a platform via patches, or fixes. Patches are critical to the protection and security of industrial control systems and should be applied as soon as possible for many reasons.

Password Policies
Enforcing stringent password policies is critical to maintaining the security of any system or network. This includes setting appropriate password parameters, forcing password changes, managing permissions, and monitoring all login attempts.

Malware Prevention
In order to defend against malicious code and software, which can be transmitted online or offline (via USB drives, etc.), system administrators should deploy antivirus programs and regularly update virus definitions.

Firewalls
Firewalls can be used to secure the outer perimeter and as a means to isolate internal networks. They should be implemented and tuned using “whitelist” policies and/or in multi-vendor, multi-layer configurations.

Intrusion Detection
Host- and network-based intrusion detection systems (HIDS/NIDS) should be a core part of industrial control system (ICS) data gathering tools to ensure visibility of attacks.

Log Management
Security event logs from critical cyber assets are essential for incident response, trend reporting, root cause analysis, and audit trails. Logs must be collected and analyzed, and should be able to generate alerts.