OT Security, Segmentation & Hardening
Securing the plant floor without stopping the plant.
OT Security, Segmentation & Hardening
Securing the plant floor without stopping the plant.
Manufacturing and industrial environments don't tolerate the IT playbook. You can't push agents to a PLC, you can't reboot a line mid-shift to patch, and a false-positive block on a controller costs real money every minute. Cyber Frontline's OT practice is built by practitioners who have secured live production environments at Tier 1 automotive suppliers — where downtime is measured in dollars per second and OEM audits ask hard questions about your plant network.
OT/ICS Security Assessments
- Asset discovery & inventory — Passive network mapping of PLCs, HMIs, drives, robots, SCADA servers, historians, and engineering workstations. You can't segment or defend what you haven't inventoried — and most plants are surprised by what we find.
- OT risk & vulnerability assessment — Aligned to IEC 62443 and NIST SP 800-82, with risk ratings that account for safety and availability impact, not just confidentiality. No active scanning against fragile controllers; we work from passive captures, configuration review, and vendor advisories.
- TISAX & IATF alignment — We map your OT findings directly to the VDA ISA catalogue and OEM customer-specific requirements, so plant-floor remediation earns compliance credit.
Network Segmentation & the Purdue Model (PERA)
We design and implement segmentation architectures based on the Purdue Enterprise Reference Architecture (PERA) — the reference model behind IEC 62443 zones and conduits and the architecture your OEM customers and auditors expect to see:
- Level 0–1 (Process & Basic Control) — Sensors, actuators, PLCs, and safety systems isolated from everything that doesn't need to talk to them. Safety instrumented systems segmented from basic control.
- Level 2 (Area Supervisory Control) — HMIs and SCADA segmented by production cell or line, so a compromise in one area can't move laterally across the plant.
- Level 3 (Site Operations) — MES, historians, batch systems, and engineering workstations in their own zone, with controlled conduits down to Level 2 and strictly brokered access upward.
- Level 3.5 (Industrial DMZ) — The non-negotiable buffer. Every IT-to-OT data flow — ERP integrations, label printing, cloud connectors, vendor remote access — terminates in the iDMZ and is re-established outbound. No direct traffic between Level 4 and Level 3 or below, ever.
- Level 4–5 (Enterprise & Cloud) — Business systems, email, and SaaS platforms kept firmly on the IT side of the boundary.
Our delivery approach:
- Current-state mapping — document actual data flows (including the undocumented ones keeping production running).
- Target architecture design — zones, conduits, firewall placement, VLAN/VRF strategy, and an iDMZ pattern sized to your environment
- Phased migration — sequenced during planned downtime windows, with rollback plans for every change; we never bet a production line on a cutover.
- Conduit policy engineering — least-privilege firewall rule sets per conduit, with protocol-aware inspection where the gear supports it.
- Secure remote access — replacing vendor VPNs and unmanaged TeamViewer installs with brokered, recorded, MFA-enforced access through the iDMZ.
CIS Benchmark Hardening
Compliance frameworks say "harden your systems"; CIS Benchmarks define what that actually means, system by system. Our hardening service:
- Baseline assessment — Automated configuration scans (CIS-CAT and equivalent tooling) of Windows servers and workstations, Linux, network devices, hypervisors, and cloud platforms (M365, Azure, AWS) against the applicable CIS Benchmark.
- Risk-ranked remediation — We separate the quick wins from the changes that need testing, and flag settings that conflict with legacy industrial software before they break anything. Level 1 profiles as the default baseline; Level 2 where your risk or contracts demand it.
- OT-aware exceptions — Engineering workstations and HMI hosts often can't take a full benchmark. We document deviations with compensating controls — exactly the evidence trail ISO 27001 (A.8.9 configuration management), PCI-DSS Requirement 2, and TISAX assessors look for.
- Golden images & drift monitoring — Hardened build standards for new deployments, plus continuous configuration-drift detection so the baseline you certified is the baseline you're still running at audit time.
- Group Policy / Intune / Ansible implementation — We don't just hand you a 900-page benchmark PDF; we implement the controls through your management tooling and prove them with before/after scan reports.
Why It Matters for Your Certifications
Framework | Where OT segmentation & hardening earn credit |
|---|---|
ISO 27001 | A.8.9 configuration mgmt, A.8.20–8.22 network security & segregation |
TISAX | VDA ISA network security, IT/OT separation expectations for prototype & production data |
IATF 16949 | Cyber-attack contingency planning; OEM CSRs increasingly require plant network controls |
PCI-DSS | Requirement 1 (segmentation can dramatically shrink your CDE) & Requirement 2 (hardening standards) |
HIPAA | §164.312 technical safeguards; network segmentation of biomedical/lab devices |
CTPAT | Minimum Security Criteria cybersecurity requirements for systems supporting supply chain operations |