Lion Cipher Lab

Assess an OT network against ISA/IEC 62443: map the Purdue model, draw zones and conduits, and write the segmentation assessment

• GRC / Compliance
• Intermediate
• ~70 min
• Free · no account required

Why it matters

The computers that run water, power, manufacturing and building systems were, for decades, defended by an assumption that turned out to be a fantasy: that they were 'air-gapped' — physically disconnected from everything else. They almost never are. A vendor laptop, a remote-support modem, a shared historian feeding a business dashboard, a flat network a contractor plugged into — any one of these quietly bridges the plant floor to the internet, and the protocols on that plant floor, as the Modbus labs in this catalog prove firsthand, will obey any command they receive without asking who sent…

What you'll learn

• reading an OT/ICS environment and sorting every device into a Purdue model level (0 field devices through 5 enterprise, plus the 3.5 industrial DMZ)
• telling OT security apart from IT security: why availability and safety come before confidentiality, why decade-old kit cannot be patched or rebooted on demand
• drawing ISA/IEC 62443 zones and conduits around a real scenario
• assigning each zone a target Security Level (SL-T) and justifying it
• identifying the crossings that need a conduit — and choosing between a firewall, an industrial DMZ, and a data diode
• writing a short zone-and-conduit assessment document with findings and the segmentation you would enforce
• knowing the honest limit: segmentation is necessary but not sufficient, and where monitoring has to take over

Steps in this lab

1. The vocabulary, from absolute zero — the words the whole field is spoken in
2. Why OT is not IT — the inversion that IT people get wrong
3. The Purdue model — the map everyone draws the plant on
4. Adopt the scenario and set up your assessment folder
5. Map every asset to a Purdue level
6. Draw the zones and conduits — and assign each zone a target Security Level
7. Guard the crossings — firewall, industrial DMZ, or data diode
8. Write the assessment — findings and the segmentation you would enforce
9. Why this, not that — the judgment to carry out of the lab

Open the full interactive lab →