ICS/OT Cybersecurity
Serious Protection
Industrial control systems were built to run reliably for decades. They were not built to withstand a threat environment where nation-state actors pre-position inside utility networks, ransomware crews target manufacturing, and the line between IT and OT erodes a little more every year. Securing these environments is not a matter of applying enterprise IT security to the plant floor. It requires people who understand the protocols, the constraints, the safety implications, and the operational realities that make OT security fundamentally different.
Ampyx Cyber secures the industrial systems that the world depends on. From program development to penetration testing, network monitoring to incident response, we bring deep OT and ICS expertise to every engagement, and we do it without disrupting the operations we are there to protect. Below are some of the most common ways we help industrial organizations defend what matters.
RAPID-OT Assessment
Where do you stand?
Find out fast.
Our RAPID-OT Assessment delivers a swift, affordable, expert-led snapshot of your operational technology environment, giving you clarity on your current security posture in a fraction of the time a full assessment takes. Designed for industrial asset owners, it establishes a solid baseline and answers the question every security program starts with: where do you stand? By combining no-touch tool-based assessment with expert eyes-on analysis, we identify your key vulnerabilities and operational risks without disrupting your systems or your people. The result is a quick, concise, actionable report that eliminates guesswork and lets your team prioritize remediation with confidence.
What the RAPID-OT Assessment delivers:
Rapid, expert-led OT posture baseline
No-touch and low-touch assessment methods
Key vulnerability and operational risk identification
Concise, prioritized, actionable reporting
A foundation for building a more resilient OT security program
Gap Assessments & Mock Audits
You probably have more in place than you get credit for.
Let's document it and find what's left.
Whether a regulator requires it, a customer demands it, you’re increasing your cyber insurance, or you simply need to know, measuring your environment against a recognized framework is how you turn a vague sense of exposure into a specific, prioritized list of work. The value is not the score. The value is knowing which gaps actually matter for your risk profile, your obligations, and your operational reality, and which ones are noise you can safely deprioritize.
Ampyx Cyber assesses industrial environments against the frameworks that apply to them. We do not just know the documents. We know how they are interpreted in the field, how auditors/assessors apply them, and where the requirements written for enterprise IT break down when applied to a plant floor or a substation. That distinction matters. A gap assessment that flags every deviation from an IT-centric control catalog produces a report nobody can act on. We tell you what is genuinely a gap, what is a compensating control that will hold up under scrutiny, and what sequence of work closes the most risk for the least operational disruption.
For organizations subject to more than one framework, we normalize the requirements into a single view. Most controls overlap substantially across NERC CIP, IEC 62443, NIST, and the EU frameworks. Assessing against each one separately duplicates effort and produces conflicting priorities. We map them together so one body of evidence satisfies multiple obligations.
Frameworks and standards we assess against include:
NERC CIP
NIST Cybersecurity Framework (CSF) and SP 800 series
CMMC
IEC 62443
ISO 27000 series
CIS Critical Security Controls
SANS Five Critical Controls for ICS
CISA Cybersecurity Performance Goals
Cybersecurity Baselines for Electric Distribution Systems and DER
NRECA Co-op Cyber Goals
TSA Security Directives
API 1164
ES-C2M2 and ONG-C2M2
NIS2, including national transpositions
EU Cyber Resilience Act
KRITIS and KRITIS-DACHG
Cloud Security Alliance CCM
Multiple capability maturity models
Our gap assessment services include:
Single-framework and multi-framework gap assessment
Cross-framework control mapping and normalization
Mock audit and audit readiness assessment
Compensating control evaluation and defensibility review
Prioritized remediation roadmap with operational sequencing
Evidence sufficiency review
Repeat assessment for measured improvement over time
Penetration Testing
We test like an attacker.
We tread like an engineer.
Most asset owners never allow a penetration test in their OT environment, and for a understandable reason: the fear that testing itself will cause the very outage it was meant to prevent. That fear is legitimate. A careless scan or an aggressive exploit against fragile industrial equipment can disrupt production, trip safety systems, or damage devices that take months to replace. This is exactly why OT penetration testing demands a fundamentally different discipline than enterprise IT testing.
Ampyx Cyber delivers operations-first ICS/OT penetration testing that safely validates real-world attack paths without disrupting production. We begin with clear rules of engagement, defined test windows, and a threat-modeled plan built around your specific environment. Throughout the engagement we favor flags and proof-of-concepts over risky actions, demonstrating that an attack path exists without actually detonating it against live equipment. The result is genuine insight into how an adversary would move through your environment, delivered with the operational caution that industrial systems require.
Our coverage spans the full industrial attack surface, from field devices to the cloud connectors increasingly bridging OT and enterprise networks:
Hardware: PLCs, RTUs, gateways, and HMIs
Software: engineering workstations, jump hosts, and application servers
Firmware, bootloaders, and UEFI
Web services and APIs
Directory services (AD/LDAP) and databases (historians, CMDB)
IT/OT boundaries, remote access pathways, and ICS DMZs
Wireless, serial, and fieldbus protocols
Cloud and edge connectors
Every engagement is designed around your operational reality and includes:
A threat-modeled test plan scoped to your environment and mapped to MITRE ATT&CK for ICS
Clear rules of engagement and defined test windows
Evidence-backed findings with demonstrated attack paths
Prioritized, actionable remediation guidance
Optional purple-team collaboration with your defenders
A confirmation re-test to verify that remediation closed the gap
Whether you need a targeted assessment of a specific system or a comprehensive evaluation of your entire OT environment, we scope the work to what you actually need and execute it with the care your operations demand.
Secure Architecture & Network Segmentation
Most OT networks were designed for uptime.
Not for defense.
Over time, connections accumulate, boundaries blur, and what was once a contained operational network becomes a sprawling attack surface. Whether you are designing a new ICS network from scratch or hardening what you already have, Ampyx Cyber builds architectures that are resilient by design. From network segmentation and ICS DMZ design to dependency management and intelligent islanding, we focus on one outcome: keeping your operations running even when your network is under attack. Security that does not interfere with operations is not a compromise. It is the standard we hold ourselves to.
Our architecture and segmentation services include:
OT/ICS network architecture design and review
Network segmentation and micro-segmentation
ICS DMZ design and implementation
Zero trust architecture for OT environments
Intelligent islanding and ransomware containment design
Remote access architecture
Defense-in-depth strategy
Resilience and continuity-of-operations design
Network Anomaly Detection & INSM
Know more about your network than the adversary does.
Right now, they may see more than you.
In OT environments, attackers move slowly and deliberately, blending into normal operations for months before making their presence known. Network anomaly detection gives you the visibility to catch that activity before it becomes a crisis. Ampyx Cyber designs and implements Internal Network Security Monitoring solutions tailored to the unique protocols, architectures, and operational constraints of industrial networks. We help you define what to monitor, where to place sensors, how to tune for signal over noise, and what evidence to retain for audit and incident response. For utilities subject to NERC CIP, we build toward CIP-015-1 compliance from the ground up. For all other industrial operators, we establish the baseline visibility your security program depends on. We work with commercial and open-source platforms and have no vendor allegiances. Only the right fit for your environment.
The value of this visibility extends well beyond security. The same monitoring that detects an intruder also surfaces the misconfigured device, the failing network link, the unexpected traffic pattern, and the slow degradation that precedes an operational failure. Many organizations find that the operational benefits alone justify the investment. When something goes wrong on the network, whether it is an attack or simply a fault, the difference between hours and days of downtime often comes down to whether you had the visibility to see what actually happened. INSM gives your operations team a faster path to root cause, and it turns network monitoring from a compliance cost into an operational asset.
Our anomaly detection and INSM services include:
INSM solution design and implementation
CIP-015 compliance-focused monitoring architecture
Sensor placement and network visibility planning
Baseline development and anomaly tuning
Detection use case development
Evidence retention design for audit and incident response
Commercial and open-source platform selection and integration
Vulnerability Assessment & Management
In OT, the assessment can be the outage.
We know the difference.
Vulnerability assessment in the ICS/OT space demands a far more delicate approach than in enterprise IT. We assess your environment through configuration review, firmware versions, settings, and architecture analysis, giving you a thorough understanding of your vulnerabilities without causing any unscheduled outages. For systems that can safely survive an active assessment, we are skilled in the full range of scanning and penetration testing tools. The right method depends on what your environment can safely tolerate, and knowing that difference is exactly the point.
Our vulnerability assessment and management services include:
No-touch and low-touch OT vulnerability assessment
Configuration, firmware, and settings review
Architecture-based vulnerability analysis
Active scanning where operationally safe
Vulnerability prioritization and risk contextualization
Remediation planning and validation
Ongoing vulnerability management program design
Incident Response & Forensics
In OT, pulling the plug isn't an option.
Incident response has to work differently.
Shutting down systems, isolating networks, and preserving forensic evidence all carry operational consequences that IT-focused incident response teams are not equipped to navigate. When an incident hits a control system, the response decisions have to account for physical processes, safety systems, and reliability obligations that simply do not exist in enterprise IT. Ampyx Cyber provides ICS-specific incident response and digital forensics with the operational discipline that industrial environments demand, and with the regulatory understanding that a control-system incident requires.
Most DFIR firms cannot parse the protocols that run industrial environments. We can. Our OT and SCADA technical depth includes control-system protocol analysis for S7comm, GOOSE, IEC-104, and ICCP, network and topology analysis using OT-specific tooling, and memory and firmware forensics that preserve evidence integrity without extending downtime or introducing new risk to production systems. Our work aligns with NERC CIP incident response and reporting requirements and IEC 62443, which means the compliance dimension of an incident is handled by a firm that helped write the standards governing it.
We help you prepare before an event and respond decisively when one occurs.
Our incident response capabilities include:
Senior incident response leadership and executive incident coordination
Incident Response Plan development, review, and exercises (CIP-008 and CIP-009)
OT-aware incident triage with safety-first assessment of control environments
Enterprise and critical infrastructure incident response
Root cause analysis and post-incident review
Recovery and restoration support
Retainer-based response availability with defined response profiles
Our digital forensics capabilities include:
Digital evidence acquisition and forensic preservation
Chain of custody management and secure evidence storage
ICS and OT network traffic analysis of control-system protocols (S7comm, GOOSE, IEC-104, ICCP)
Network configuration and topology analysis using OT-specific tooling (NP-View, FRENOS)
Log and packet capture analysis (Wireshark, NetworkMiner)
Memory and firmware forensics, including preservation of virtual machine memory
Expert reporting, technical consultation, and expert witness support
Standards-aligned handling for NERC CIP and IEC 62443
Our forensic work is led by senior investigators with decades of experience spanning ransomware, advanced persistent threats, insider threats, and OT and critical infrastructure investigations, carrying credentials that include CHFI, CISM, CISA, CCISO, and licensed professional investigator status. For retained engagements, we offer defined emergency response profiles including rapid response times, on-site availability, and secure local evidence preservation.
OT Security Program Development
The right people, processes, and technology.
Built for OT, not borrowed from IT.
Depending on where your organization is in its security journey, you may be missing the people, the processes, or the technology needed for an effective ICS/OT security program. Ampyx Cyber builds full-service programs tailored to your business, size, and industry, designed to be relevant, actionable, sustainable, and affordable. We meet you where you are and build toward where you need to be, and we show you how to demonstrate measurable value from the program along the way.
For operators in Europe, we build programs that satisfy NIS2 and, where applicable, IEC 62443 and the German BSI regime, so your program stands up to your competent authority rather than just to good practice.
Our program development services include:
OT/ICS security program design and roadmap
Organizational structure and governance
Security policy, standard, and procedure development
Monitoring and visibility strategy
Incident management planning
Security architecture, including OT/IT separation
Threat and vulnerability management program design
Staffing and capability development
Program metrics and value demonstration
Asset Inventory & Management
Could you list every device on your OT network?
The device you forgot about is the one they'll use.
A complete and accurate inventory of your critical ICS/OT assets is the foundation that every other security and compliance function depends on. Loss prevention, regulatory compliance, configuration management, vulnerability management, incident response, disaster recovery, business continuity, and supply chain risk management all start with knowing what you have. In OT environments this is harder than it sounds, because devices accumulate across decades of operational change and documentation rarely keeps pace. Ampyx Cyber helps you build and maintain an accurate asset baseline at any scale, from manual assessment for smaller environments to implementation of automated discovery tools for larger, more complex ones.
Our asset inventory and management services include:
OT/ICS asset discovery and inventory
Manual and automated inventory approaches
Asset classification and criticality rating
Configuration and change management integration
Inventory maintenance and validation processes
Automated discovery tool selection and implementation
Ask An Expert
GOT A TOUGH QUESTION?
Sometimes you just need to phone a friend. Ask us anything, any time. You don’t need to be an existing or prospective client. No cost, no hassle and no commitment. We will not put you on a contact list and our sales team won’t harass you. We will always respect your privacy. We promise. Just real answers from real experts for real problems.