SANS ICS 612 Review Part 1

SANS Institute recently introduced a new class in their ICS Track; ICS 612:  ICS Cybersecurity In-Depth.  In the SANS world this, as a 600 level class would be an upper level Masters course.  The course was developed by Tim Conway, Jeff Shearer, Jason Dely, and Chris Robinson.  Tim, Jeff, and Jason are actually instructing.

So far the class has been excellent.  It covers a wide variety of subjects in a logical sequence with days broken down, (so far), into Local Process: which deals mainly with local interaction with the PLC and other lower level equipment, System of System: which deals with pulling the local processes up into more distributed systems, and ICS Network Infrastructure: covering network equipment, segmentation and monitoring (we are only about half through this module),  Everything has a lot of  hands on using a student kit tied into a pod shared by two students.

Some of the topics being covered are:

PLC programming
Secure Architecture
Process and Data Flow
Remote Access

My only criticisms are the timing on the labs aren't quite right, but it's a beta course so that will get worked out, and I like case studies and so far there is only one.

I will finish this review after the course ends tomorrow night but so far I highly recommend it.