ICS
Industrial Control Systems
Industrielle Steuerungssysteme
ICS denotes the control systems that monitor and regulate industrial processes — for instance in manufacturing, energy supply or water management. These include components such as programmable logic controllers (PLC), supervisory systems (SCADA, DCS) and operator interfaces (HMI). Unlike in office IT, this is about the direct control of physical processes.
History & facts. ICS environments were built over decades for availability and long service life, not for cybersecurity — many components communicate via protocols without authentication and run on systems that are rarely updated. For a long time their isolation from the internet protected them above all; with IT/OT convergence this protection increasingly falls away. High-profile attacks have shown that targeted manipulation of control logic is real.
Outlook & recommendation. Securing begins with visibility: you can only protect what you know. Since active intervention and restarts are risky in ICS, passive detection, strict network segmentation (zones and conduits per IEC 62443) and tight control of remote access are the load-bearing measures. The ICS-specific attacker perspective is systematised by ATT&CK for ICS.