Safe ICS Penetration Testing Scope: Protecting Operations
Master safe ICS penetration testing scope without disrupting operations. Red Trident’s field-tested methods protect uptime while validating defenses.
Identify critical assets, risks and attack vectors with OT Cybersecurity Assessments
Our main OT cybersecurity assessments are the following:
- Asset & Network Discovery
- Vulnerability Assessment – Penetration Tests (VAPT)
- Risk Assessments
We also offer additional OT assessments such as Red Team exercises, compliance assessments, incident response assessments and more!
Importance of Having Regular OT Cybersecurity Assessments
Back in the day, IT and OT were kept separate, but nowadays with increasing interconnection and the desire for more data and streamlined processes, this gap has diminished. An understanding of what you have, how it’s all connected and the vulnerabilities that exist is crucial when it comes to protecting industrial businesses. Our OT cybersecurity assessments offer a holistic analysis of threats and vulnerabilities with recommendations on how to fix the security gaps.
Do you know your vulnerabilities? Stop assuming and start knowing. Businesses who wait until it’s too late will end up spending significantly more financially compared to businesses who are proactive.
Red Trident offers a full spectrum of OT cybersecurity services
- Advise – Provide guidance and compliance support
- Assess – Uncover vulnerabilities & exploit them
- Fix/Remediate – Fix the problems to lower the risk
- Monitor – Detect and respond to alerts & hunt for threats
- Respond – Incident response for any issues that arise
- Train – Provide training to your in-house team
OT Cybersecurity Assessments
– Step 1 –
Asset & Network Discovery
In order to implement a security program around production OT environments, you must understand what you have. This includes systems, software, policies, processes, and personnel.
- Comprehensive understanding of your environment
- Typically finds devices you didn’t realize you still had (and data flows that should have been removed years ago)
- Having this foundation, allows a more focused and accurate risk assessment
If you don’t currently have an accurate and up-to-date inventory list, this is where we’d recommend you start.
– Step 2 –
Vulnerability Assessment
The next step falls into the “Identify” phase of a cybersecurity program and highlights areas of mitigation, improvement, and risk reduction for an organization.
- Identifies vulnerabilities and misconfiguration of ICS hardware, software, and networks
- Provides a clear picture of connectivity and networked assets
- Identifies risks associated with existing processes, standards, and personnel
- Identifies current capabilities to protect, detect, respond, and recover from attacks, security anomalies, or incidents
– Step 3 –
Risk Assessment
A cybersecurity risk assessment is a vital process that helps organizations identify and understand the digital threats they face. By analyzing assets, vulnerabilities, and evaluating potential impacts, this assessment helps to prioritize risks and take decisive action to protect data and systems. The outcome is a detailed understanding of risk with the risk value quantified in dollars invested.
- Provides detailed Risk Understanding
- Shows the financial risk your cyber investment has provided
- Shows if and where investments should be made to manage additional risk
Other OT Cybersecurity Assessments
Security Architecture Reviews
Whether you have brown field OT environments or are moving to green field, it is critical to understand security risks in architecture and network design and how to mitigate those risks. At Red Trident, our expertise in network architecture design can identify shortcomings in existing OT network architecture or even provide input from the start of the design process for a new OT environment.
- Brownfield Architecture Review
- Early Design phase engagement
- Security Acceptance Testing and Design Reviews
- Support for remote access and digital initiatives
ICS Compliance Assessments
Red Trident’s cybersecurity team has extensive experience in many OT environments including wastewater, power and utility, oil and gas, maritime, and manufacturing. Because of this, we can support cybersecurity assessments focused on regulatory, standards-based, or contractual requirements.
- Frameworks and Standards
- Regulatory compliance requirements
- Contractual compliance requirements
Incident Response Capability Assessment
A key component of any OT cybersecurity program is incident response. If you have an incident response team, plan, or playbook in place but don’t know how your organization would respond to a severe incident, Red Trident can help. If you haven’t yet documented or built an incident response capability, we can help there as well.
- Tabletop exercises to evaluate and document gaps in response capabilities, tools, and processes
- Identify response effectiveness against real-world attack scenarios
- Identify risks in communication, planning, and logistics during an incident
- Alignment of Business Continuity Plans to respond effectively to cyber events
- Scenarios targeted to your organization based upon threat intelligence and your critical risks and concerns
Red Team Exercises
Physical and logical attack campaigns that simulate real-world tactics, techniques, and procedures to break into an organization’s infrastructure and move throughout the environment. This testing challenges and evaluates existing physical and logical security measures and technologies in place and helps the organization understand how they people, processes, and technology will stand against attacks of various scales.
- Social Engineering
- Physical Red Team Exercises
- Real-world attack simulation to identify detection and response capabilities
Operational Continuity & Recovery Assessment
Ensuring an organization has the ability to continue operations or recover is critical to limiting the impact of an incident in ICS environments. The baseline of ‘what is in place’, should be fully understood and all of the components of operational continuity and recovery should be evaluated. This includes the plans, personnel, procedures, backups, spares, and redundancy. The following are areas of focus when evaluating documentation and the environment to which it applies:
- Personnel
- Communications
- Technology Issues
- Facilities
- Manual Operations
- Redundancy of Control, Operation, and Supervision
- Critical Spares
- Software Version Control
- Data Recovery
- Backup and Recovery
- Procedures
- Backups and business tolerance for each of these areas
ICS Security Assessment: What We Examine
An ICS security assessment has to cover the things an attacker would actually use, not just the things a scanner can see. Ours examines the controllers and HMIs and the firmware and configurations they run; the network between them, including the paths into the control network from the enterprise side; every remote-access route, including vendor and integrator connections; the operating systems and software on engineering workstations and servers; and the people and processes around them, from change control to how a contractor gets on the network. The output is a prioritized set of findings with the risk each one carries for the process, and a remediation plan sequenced for a running plant.
A Safety-First Method for Live Production Environments
We prefer to perform assessments on site, and for live production environments we strongly recommend it. On the plant floor our engineers can see the physical network, the panels and the connections that never appear in a diagram, work alongside your control engineers and make safety calls in real time. The method is passive and read-only first: configuration review, traffic observation and documentation analysis before anything interacts with a device. Active checks are agreed in advance, limited to specific assets, and run in maintenance windows with your engineers present. Our proprietary AART (Automated Assessment and Response Toolkit) supports the engineers by automating host-level data collection, asset characterization, configuration analysis and security-control validation, which shortens the assessment, reduces manual collection and keeps findings consistent across sites. Every finding is still validated by an engineer.
Third-Party Remote Access and IT/OT Segmentation
Two areas decide most of the risk we find. The first is remote access: vendor portals, jump servers, cellular modems and the “temporary” connections that outlived their purpose. We evaluate each route for who can use it, how it authenticates, whether sessions are logged, and whether it lands inside the control network or in a controlled zone. The second is the boundary between IT and OT. We map the real data flows across it, test whether the firewall rules and DMZ match the intent, and look for the lateral paths from the corporate network into the process that segmentation was supposed to remove.
One-Time Assessment or Ongoing OT Vulnerability Management
A single assessment establishes the baseline: what you have, how it is connected and where the exposures are. Many operators then move to a cycle of re-validation as assets, firmware and network paths change. If you need the recurring program rather than the snapshot, see our OT vulnerability assessment and management service; if you need to prove exploitability rather than catalogue exposure, see ICS/OT penetration testing; and if the inventory itself is the gap, start with OT asset discovery.
How ICS Risk Assessments Are Scoped and Sized
Engagements are sized by the environment: the number of sites and network zones, how many control assets and of what variety, the remote-access footprint, whether an accurate inventory already exists, and the depth of the risk analysis and remediation roadmap you want. A focused single-site assessment and a multi-site program with compliance mapping against IEC 62443, NIST SP 800-82 or NERC CIP are different engagements and are scoped differently. A scoping call tells you what the assessment would cover and what it would cost before anyone is on site.
ICS Security Assessment FAQ
How do you perform an ICS risk assessment?
In phases: stakeholder and operator interviews, passive network observation, read-only configuration review of controllers, hosts and network devices, then analysis of the exposures against the consequence they carry for the process. Active scanning follows the passive phase, planned with your operations team and performed by engineers who have run active scans on production control networks for years; it provides the version, service and configuration detail that passive observation cannot. The result is a prioritized risk picture and a remediation plan.
Do you assess on site or remotely?
On site by preference, and strongly recommended for live production. Remote work is limited to document review, follow-up validation and sites where access is not practical.
What OT vulnerabilities could cause a plant shutdown?
Weaknesses that let an attacker reach and manipulate the process: exposed or poorly segmented controllers, insecure industrial protocols reachable from outside the control zone, unmanaged remote access, and default or shared credentials on PLCs, DCS controllers and HMIs. These are prioritized ahead of higher-scoring but unreachable findings.
How do you assess third-party remote access to OT systems?
We inventory every remote route, including vendor portals, jump servers and modems, and evaluate authentication strength, session logging, encryption, where the connection lands, and whether least privilege is enforced. Connections that terminate inside the control network are flagged for redesign.
How do you assess PLC and DCS cybersecurity risks?
Through configuration review for default credentials, unnecessary services and insecure protocol use such as unauthenticated Modbus or DNP3, firmware version and patch availability, and the network paths that reach the controller. Interaction with controllers is limited to what is safe and agreed with your engineers.
What should an industrial control systems security audit cover?
Network segmentation between IT and OT, remote access, asset inventory accuracy, controller and host configuration, physical access to control rooms and panels, policy and change-control adherence, and incident response readiness, mapped to the standards that apply to you such as IEC 62443, NIST SP 800-82 or NERC CIP.
How do you evaluate IT/OT network segmentation?
By mapping the actual data flows across the boundary and comparing them with the firewall rules and DMZ design, then looking for the lateral paths from the corporate network into the control zone that segmentation was meant to remove.
What compliance gaps do you most often find in utilities?
Undocumented network architecture, unmanaged or unlogged remote access, an inaccurate asset inventory, and segmentation that exists on paper but not in the firewall rules. Each is reported against the applicable standard with the control that closes it.
Why Client’s Choose Red Trident’s Assessment Services
Our team has spent years working in and around industrial control systems. We know the difference between an RTAC and a DCS, we can walkdown just about any process using documentation you have, the knowledge we bring, maybe a little help from your on-site team.
Why Red Trident
At Red Trident, we do more than provide cybersecurity assessments—we build partnerships. Your business goals and risk profile drive everything we do. From the moment we engage, our focus is on understanding your unique operating environment, listening to your concerns, and aligning our recommendations with your organizational priorities.
Our team is comprised of recognized leaders in industrial cybersecurity, with decades of experience across critical infrastructure, manufacturing, government, and defense sectors. You may have seen us on stage at global security conferences like DEF CON, Black Hat, or SANS ICS Summits. But what truly sets us apart is our commitment to clear, actionable communication—translating complex risk into practical insights your executive team can act upon.
When you choose Red Trident, you get a proactive partner committed to your long-term security posture, not just a report. Let’s move your security program forward—together.
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