ICS

Systems that control industrial processes, often fragile and long-lived.

An industrial control system manages physical processes in sectors like energy, water, and manufacturing, often using specialized components such as PLCs and protocols not designed with security in mind. These systems prioritize availability and safety, run for decades, and are hard to patch, which makes them fragile and high value targets whose compromise can cause physical harm. A frequent pitfall is connecting ICS to IT networks without strict segmentation. Frameworks like the Purdue reference architecture and dedicated zones help isolate them from general corporate traffic.