Build Your OT Toolbox: It’s Dangerous to Go Alone, So Take These Tools!

Jori VanAntwerp

CEO and Founder at EmberOT || Web

For over two decades, Jori has enabled industrial and IT organizations to be successful in reducing risk, increasing compliance, and improving their overall security efforts. He has had the pleasure of working with companies such as Gravwell, Dragos, CrowdStrike, FireEye, McAfee, and is now CEO & Founder at EmberOT, a cybersecurity startup focused on making security a reality for critical infrastructure.

What Is an OT Toolbox?

What you keep in your OT toolbox is incredibly important. One of the lesser-discussed aspects of OT/ICS defense is how important the correct tool stack is for preventing downtime and keeping operations secure.

Given the wide variance across sites, systems, and operational environments, finding the right tool for specific needs is more challenging than one might think. 

The good news is that, from the helpdesk to developers, operators, and defenders, we all share the same challenges of keeping our systems up, efficient, healthy, and safe. So it’s no surprise that a plethora of open-source tools have been designed to address these common challenges.

The bad news is… There are a plethora of free, open source tools designed to specifically address these challenges, and it can be difficult to understand which tool to use when or which tool best fits your needs.

Fortunately, we are here to help ignite the path. It is dangerous to go alone, so take this. A curated set of community open source tools that help you see what is actually happening in your environment and start breaking through challenges.

Every OT environment is unique. Each one is purpose-built, shaped by real operational needs, and engineered to keep critical processes running. Because of that, no single tool will be the perfect fit for everyone. The good news is that community open source gives you room to adjust and adapt many of these tools so they support your workflow as you learn.

To make things easy, we’ve grouped everything into three categories. Each one includes a quick note on the experience level usually needed, so you can choose the right place to begin and build from there.

How to Use This Guide

You do not need to learn every tool in this list. Start with one or two that match your comfort level and the challenge in front of you. Use the difficulty and OS columns as quick filters.

Whenever possible, begin in a lab, test network, or low-risk segment. Capturing and analyzing traffic is usually safe, but generating or replaying traffic can affect sensitive systems. When in doubt, check with your OT or operations team before testing new tools in production.

OT Tool Categories

These tools help you understand what is happening across your environment. From network activity to system behavior and defensive insight, they give you a clearer view of assets, protocols, operational patterns, and environmental interactions across your environment, no matter the Purdue level.

Reading the Table

• Difficulty
  • 🟢Beginner: Good starting point if you are new to OT, networking, or security
  • 🟡Intermediate: Best if you have used basic command-line tools or similar utilities
  • 🔴Advanced: For users comfortable with deeper analysis, scripting, or more complex workflows
• OS shows where the tool is most commonly used
• 🔥Indicates EmberOT Approved. We regularly use these tools ourselves.

Open-Source OT Visibility, Network Analysis, and Defensive Security Tools

OT visibility tools help engineers, operators, and security teams understand what is happening across industrial networks. These open-source OT security tools support network monitoring, packet analysis, asset discovery, intrusion detection, and forensic investigations. They are commonly used to identify devices, analyze industrial protocols, investigate abnormal behavior, and improve visibility across OT and ICS environments.

Common OT Use Cases

• Industrial network monitoring
• ICS protocol analysis
• OT asset discovery
• Packet capture and traffic analysis
• Incident investigation and forensic analysis
• Threat detection and visibility improvement

Who Uses These OT Security Tools?

These tools are commonly used by:

• OT security analysts
• ICS defenders
• Industrial network engineers
• Incident responders
• Reliability engineers
• OT architects
• Cybersecurity researchers

OT System Analysis, Digital Forensics, and Security Assessment Tools

OT system analysis tools help teams investigate devices, examine logs, assess security posture, and understand system behavior beyond the network layer. These tools support digital forensics, memory analysis, vulnerability identification, and OT cybersecurity assessments, making them valuable for both incident response and proactive security improvement.

Common OT Use Cases

• Memory forensics
• Security assessments
• Vulnerability analysis
• Log review and investigation
• Incident response
• Compliance and framework evaluations

OT Lab, ICS Simulation, and Adversary Emulation Tools

OT lab and simulation tools allow practitioners to safely test security concepts, emulate industrial processes, simulate adversary behavior, and build hands-on experience without impacting production systems. These tools are widely used for OT security training, research, detection engineering, and defensive validation.

Common OT Use Cases

• OT security training
• ICS simulation
• Adversary emulation
• Detection engineering
• Security research
• Defensive tool validation

Putting Your OT Toolbox to Work

The OT, technology, and security world runs on community. People who build, fix, operate, and protect systems and operations that keep everything moving. These open source tools come straight from that spirit. They are created by practitioners who face the same challenges you do and share the same drive to keep things running strong.

Explore them. Experiment with them. See what sparks new ideas as you grow your skills. And if you end up improving one or building something of your own, we would love to hear about it.

* This OT toolbox is designed as a living resource for engineers, operators, and security teams working in industrial environments. As new tools emerge and operational challenges evolve, this guide will continue to grow with community input and real-world use cases. Explore more OT/ICS visibility research and tools in the EmberOT resource library.

~Jori 🤘🔥