Security News > 2022 > July > Israel’s new cyber-kinetic lab will boost the resilience of critical infrastructure

In a building under construction at the Advanced Technologies Park in Be'er Sheva, the "Cyber capital" of Israel, a new governmental lab is also taking shape: the National Cyber-Kinetic Lab for ICS and OT. A joint venture between the Israel Ministry of Energy and the Israel National Cyber Directorate, it will serve as a sandbox for testing computing devices embedded in physical processes and simulating cyber-attacks on scaled-down models of real-life industrial and critical infrastructure control systems.

"The lab should be up and running in a couple of months and we plan to open it to the world in the second part of 2023," Dadi Gertler, Executive Director of Technology Systems within the Cyber Technology Unit at the INCD, told Help Net Security at Cyber Week in Tel Aviv last month.

Testing the cyber and physical resilience of critical infrastructure systems can't be safely and effectively performed on real-world production sites.

A cyber-kinetic testing lab is just the ticket for cyber authorities, government agencies, government-owned organizations and private sector companies that operate the infrastructure critical to the safety of the country and its citizens.

While not the first of its kind in the world, the National Cyber-Kinetic Lab for ICS and OT is the first one of its kind in Israel and it's unique in the sense that it will accommodate several scaled-down ICS models: a power production facility, a water purification plant, and a building management system.

The lab's initial "Clients" will be the institutions operating critical infrastructure in Israel, as well as Israeli startups looking to innovate and create new cybersecurity solutions for systems underpinning critical infrastructure.

News URL

https://www.helpnetsecurity.com/2022/07/27/cyber-lab-ics-ot/