GICSP Certification Study Guide 2026 by Kai London
The industrial cyber security practitioner has to hold three disciplines at once — engineering, IT and security — and be examined across all of them. This guide covers that ground in one pass, with the engineering context that stops security answers from being wrong on a plant floor.
Available on Amazon. An independent study guide — not affiliated with, endorsed by or accredited by any certification body.
What is inside
ICS architecture and process
Purdue levels, DCS and SCADA topologies, safety instrumented systems, and what each layer is actually there to do.
Field devices and protocols
PLCs, RTUs, HMIs and the industrial protocols — including where authentication simply does not exist.
Secure design and hardening
Segmentation, remote access, patching under availability constraints, and compensating controls that hold.
Monitoring and detection
Industrial telemetry, baselines and anomaly detection tuned to a process rather than to an office network.
Incident response in production
Containment, forensics and recovery when stopping the system is itself the most damaging option.
Review questions
Exam-style questions with explained reasoning across the full engineering-plus-security syllabus.
Who it is for: control and automation engineers moving into security, OT security practitioners preparing for industrial certification, and IT security staff being made responsible for plant environments.
In industrial security the right answer is the one the process can survive.
About the author
Professor Kai London — CISSP, CISM.
An internationally recognised cybersecurity executive, board advisor and Founder & CEO of Quantum AI Systems Security LLC, writing at the convergence of AI, governance and operational resilience. Honorary Professor and Researcher at UCL.