Protocol Risk Is Business Risk: What CISOs Need to Know About OT Communications

Protocols define how trust is enforced—or ignored.

Many OT protocols were not designed to prevent tampering or impersonation. Secure connectivity requires upgrading not just networks, but communication semantics.

CISO-Level Expectations

• Authenticated protocols by default

• Encryption at trust boundaries

• Roadmaps away from insecure legacy protocols

• Explicit risk acceptance where encryption is infeasible

Executive Insight

Unsecured protocols create invisible attack paths that bypass network defenses entirely.

Final Thought: Insecure Protocols Undermine Every Other Control

Network segmentation, firewalls, and monitoring all assume that communications behave as expected. Insecure or unauthenticated protocols break that assumption.

When CISOs allow insecure protocols without explicit risk acceptance and migration planning, they are effectively waiving integrity controls across critical systems. Protocol modernization is slow—but ignoring it guarantees long-term systemic risk.

Comments

Asset Management - Physical Devices - What do you have? Do you know?

Asset management and inventorying your physical systems, we all know we should do it, and I am sure most try. I am not going to talk about the should have, would have or could have. Instead, I am going to focus on the risks associated with the NIST CSF control ID-AM.1. The control simply states, “Physical devices and systems within the organization are inventoried.” At the simplest level, this control is saying that the organization inventories all physical systems that are apart of the information system. In my opinion, the control is foundational because how can you secure something if you don't know it exists. If you are not inventorying your systems, how do you know if they have adequate controls to protect the data and network. If you had a breach of data, would you know what type of data was involved, or would you even know if you had a breach? To further extend this, how can you perform a risk assessment on the system to understand and relay ...

Vulnerability Management… It’s easy - Planning

I am sure you have had either consultants, vendors, or heard at a conference that vulnerability management is foundational security control. While I agree that it is an essential control, I also understand that it is challenging to implement. Vulnerability management is not just to pick a tool, scan, and fix issues. Many components make it a complicated journey. This series will attempt to help break it down and give you ideas on how this complex service and be delivered effectively. Planning Objective When you start, I recommend creating a targeted objective and set of measures against your objective. Ensure that you keep in mind your organization’s culture, politics, and risk appetite as you are developing your objective. I have seen some target just “critical” systems for regulatory compliance, whereas others have targeted their entire enterprise. No matter your scope, keep in mind your team’s current resource...

The Detect Function in NIST CSF 2.0: The Risk of Seeing Too Late—or Too Much

In NIST Cybersecurity Framework 2.0 (CSF 2.0) , the Detect function represents the organization’s ability to identify the occurrence of a cybersecurity event in a timely and reliable manner . While Protect focuses on reducing the likelihood of compromise, Detect determines how quickly and how accurately an organization recognizes that something has gone wrong. For CISOs and security leaders, detection is where many programs quietly fail. Not due to a lack of tools, but due to poor signal quality, unclear objectives, and misalignment with business impact. Detection that is late, noisy, or misunderstood can be as damaging as no detection at all. Official NIST CSF 2.0 guidance is available here: https://www.nist.gov/publications/nist-cybersecurity-framework-csf-20 What the Detect Function Is (and What It Enables) Under CSF 2.0, the Detect (DE) function focuses on outcomes related to: Continuous monitoring Anomalies and event detection Security logging and analysis Threat intelligence ...

Search This Blog