// Defense

Explore ICS/OT Security

Availability and safety come first here — that's not a slogan, it's the order attackers exploit.

ICS/OT security breaks the moment you bring the IT playbook wholesale: isolate, patch, reimage. In a plant, those same moves can trip a safety system or halt production — which is sometimes exactly what the attacker wanted. Nugget starts from the inversion most students never fully absorb: availability and safety outrank confidentiality, and every recommendation gets tested against that order before anything else.

A session usually opens with a diagram, not a scenario. Nugget sketches the Purdue levels or a conduit map on the whiteboard and asks you to find where a device sits, which trust domain it belongs to, and what happens if it's compromised. You'll work through Modbus and DNP3 captures reading writes as process events, not just function codes — and you'll learn why 'no authentication' is a design assumption the architecture has to compensate for, not a finding to report and move on from.

This isn't a replacement for lab time on real PLCs or a plant floor internship — it's the reasoning layer underneath that. By the time you're standing in front of an engineer asking about maintenance windows, you'll already know why that question matters more than a CVE number.

// What a session feels like

You bring the questions. Nugget asks the next one.

Nugget lays out a Purdue-level diagram with a historian bridging levels 3 and 4, and asks you to trace the conduit an attacker would ride from the enterprise network down to a PLC — then asks what stops them at each hop.
You're handed a Modbus capture in the terminal. Nugget asks you to narrate it: which role initiated the exchange, was it a read or a write, and what happens to the process if that setpoint change goes through.
Nugget separates the BPCS from the SIS on the whiteboard and asks you to place TRITON on it — then pushes you to say whether a given attacker path reaches control, safety, both, or neither, and why that changes the response.

// Pairs well with

Incident Response Software Supply Chain Security Non-Human Identity & Secrets Management

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