January 23, 2025

A four-daytraining and certification programme on "Sector Specific Operational Technology (OT)/Industrial Control System (ICS) Security - Level 2" was conducted from January 20th - 23rd, 2025 as part of "Generating Highly Skilled & Certified Cyber Security Professionals (CISOs)" for creating a robust mechanism for training and certification of CISOs, deputy CISOs, associated team of CISOs/aspirants of government and other sectors under ISEA Project Phase-III by MeitY.

16 CISO level officers from Assistant Engineer to General Manager position from various sectors like GSECL, Chennai Petroleum, Electricity transmission corpora-tions - Gujarat State, Govt. Of Puducherry, Adani Power, NCIIPC, NTPC, GAIL, and Airports Authority of India (AAI) across the country participated in the training programme.

This course covered various topics namely ICS Cyber Security architecture of critical infrastructure, best practices for securing ICS critical architectures in power energy, oil and gas industries, ICS/OT & IT integration, performing a security assessment on a critical infrastructure. More hands-on training was provided to the participants on simulations of power grid, traffic controller, voltage regulator, water treatment plant, chemical plant, log analysis in OT systems, identifying key artifacts from intrusions using Wireshark.

Participants were given several tasks: Attacking and defending the simulated critical architectures and Capture the Flag (CTF) activities. These activities are assessed and certificates are issued based on their performance.

The overall training initiate under the directive support of Dr. PR Lakshmi Eswari, Scientist G & Centre Head, C-DAC Hyderabad and course is designed & coordinated by Dr. Ch AS Murty, Scientist G and Group Head. The course implemented by Mrs. Indraveni K, Scientist E, ISS Team, Dr. Srikanth Sunnam, Scientist E, IoT Team, Shri. B. Nandeeshwar, Project Manager and Shri. Tyeb Naushad, Project Manager. CTF for the simulations were conducted by Shri. Shubham PE, Shri. Vinay Kumar, PE and Shri. Om Gandhal, PE and other technical members contributed for conducting of the lab session & CTF.

Methodology

Groups discussions, group activities, live quiz during the sessions, CTF events, lab sessions, demonstrations, hands on OT/ICS simulators, etc.,

Training Kit

The material of Cyber Security for OT/ICS Level-2 were provided to all the participants online and hard copies of lab documents, case studies were distributed.

Participants appreciated the training, giving particularly positive feedback on the interactive, hands-on, and practical sessions.