Cybrary ForgeCYBRARY / FORGE
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Plant floor

OT and ICS track

The plant is not a second office. Controllers do as they are told, the safety system has to stay independent, and taking a machine offline to be safe can be the dangerous move. These four labs run on the same ranges, diagrams and firewall console as the rest of Forge.

The levels you will be working across

  • Level 0 — process

    Sensors and actuators on the process itself.

  • Level 1 — control

    Controllers and safety systems.

  • Level 2 — supervisory

    HMIs and the local control room.

  • Level 3 — operations

    Historians, engineering and plant servers.

  • Level 3.5 — OT DMZ

    The broker between the plant and the business.

  • Level 4 — business

    Office IT: mail, files, the rest of the company.

The labs

  1. 1.

    Read the plant

    Foundation25 minutesOpen

    Walk a plant estate on the range diagram: which box is a controller, which is the HMI, which is the historian, and what Purdue level each sits at.

    • Place every machine on the plant at its Purdue level
    • Name the control protocols each device really answers on
    • Say which subnet is the OT DMZ and why it exists
  2. 2.

    Hold the boundary

    Practitioner35 minutesOpen

    Review the plant boundary in the firewall console: find every rule that lets the office speak a control protocol to the floor, and close it without breaking the historian.

    • Read a rulebase as conduits between zones, not as a list
    • Close a control-protocol path without cutting data collection
    • Justify each rule against IEC 62443 zones and conduits
  3. 3.

    Walk a payload onto the floor

    Practitioner30 minutesOpen

    Run the plant intrusion through your own range, move by move, and see which rule stops each one — and which one lets it reach a controller.

    • Trace an intrusion from the office to a controller
    • Tell a blocked move apart from one that simply had nothing to hit
    • Add the rule that stops the move that got through
  4. 4.

    A shift on the plant floor

    Advanced45 minutesOpen

    One shift on an operational-technology estate: the asset register, the control traffic, the historian trend and the alarms. Something happened that nobody scheduled.

    • Name the asset, the event and the boundary that was crossed
    • Choose a response that does not stop the process
    • Write the handover a control engineer can act on

What the plant speaks

These are the protocols the range simulates on the floor. None of them asks who is calling, which is why the boundary around them is the whole job.

  • TCP/502 Modbus/TCP
  • TCP/102 S7comm
  • TCP/44818 EtherNet/IP
  • TCP/20000 DNP3
  • TCP/2404 IEC 60870-5-104
  • UDP/47808 BACnet