Chapter 4 of Defending Bitcoin - Industrial Control Systems and Securing Critical Infrastructure.
This one is from my career defending the industrial systems that keep the world running.
Industrial control systems are the computer and network layers running physical processes. Power plants. Water treatment facilities. Pipelines. Factory floors. When one of these systems gets hit, it's not a website that goes down, it's a real-world process that stops or fails in a way that can hurt people.
Defending these systems is a different job from defending a website. The IT side of cybersecurity can usually patch on a schedule and tolerate a few minutes of downtime. The operational side often can't, because the plant has to keep running, and any unplanned stop has real consequences. The two sides optimize for opposite things.
Chapter 4 walks through the architecture, the controls, and the culture of this critical infrastructure security. How a plant gets organized into network zones so a single compromise stays contained. How we organize security controls into categories, and use security levels to scale them up to resist a determined nation-state. How the IT and OT mindsets converge when you have to defend something that absolutely cannot fail.
This is the framework the rest of the book uses. Every threat chapter in Part II uses the ideas and vocabulary from Chapter 4. Next, we see how it all connects and applies to Bitcoin.
Ask me about Bitcoin cybersecurity, BTCHEL, BIP-110, or anything else!