Part 3: Protecting PLCs and Their Environment
For many years, PLCs have been insecure by design. Several years into customizing and applying best practices from IT gave rise to secure protocols, encrypted communications, network segmentation, and so on. However, PLCs programming is still done without security in mind.
PLC secure coding practices leverage natively available functionality in the PLC. Implementing these practices requires little to no extra hardware or software. They can be incorporated into the typical PLC operating and programming workflow. The implementation requires security expertise and solid knowledge of the PLCs that need to be safeguarded, their logic, and the underlying process.