The Analog Incident Train Station Signal Lantern: Designing Handheld Paper Beacons for Dark-Out Outages

When the screens go dark, what’s left to guide you?

In a modern industrial control system (ICS) environment, we assume visibility: dashboards, logs, SIEM alerts, OT monitoring tools, online playbooks. But during a serious cyber incident, power, networks, or HMI systems can fail simultaneously. In that moment, you don’t need another portal or a 200‑page policy manual.

You need a signal lantern.

This article explores how to design handheld paper beacons—compact, field-ready runbooks that guide ICS defenders through dark-out outages. Think of them as the analog equivalent of the old train station lantern: simple, reliable, and instantly understandable in stressful, low-information conditions.

We’ll look at how effective ICS incident response depends on:

Distilled, field-tested guidance tailored to OT realities
Balanced focus on preparedness and structured response
Pre-event collaboration and exercises across all stakeholders
A solid runbook strategy with clear templates, branching logic, and maintenance
Integration with incident workflows and tracking for accountability and speed

Why ICS Incident Response Needs “Analog” Thinking

ICS and OT environments aren’t typical IT networks. They mix aging infrastructure, safety constraints, vendor-locked systems, and 24/7 production pressures. When incidents happen, the costs of downtime and missteps are high.

Traditional incident response often leans heavily on:

Online documentation portals
Centralized ticketing tools
Cloud-hosted runbooks and dashboards

Those tools are valuable—until they’re suddenly unavailable due to a cyber incident, power failure, or segmented network.

In ICS, effective incident response must assume degraded conditions:

Limited visibility into affected systems
Restricted communications between teams or sites
Loss of digital documentation or collaboration tooling
High stress, time pressure, and safety concerns

Digitally perfect plans that only work when everything is online are brittle. Analog, paper-based runbooks serve as resilient, always-on “signal lanterns” that keep teams coordinated when everything else flickers.

From Policy Binders to Handheld Beacons

Most organizations already have some form of incident documentation: policies, standards, procedures, sometimes “playbooks.” But these often fail in the field because they are:

Too long – dozens or hundreds of pages
Too abstract – focused on principles, not actions
Too generic – not tuned to specific ICS environments or constraints
Too centralized – stored in systems that might be down during an outage

The handheld paper beacon is different. It is:

Short and focused – distilled to what must be done in the first minutes and hours
Field-tested – updated based on real exercises and incidents
Role-aware – customized for operations, engineering, IT security, and management
Physically distributed – printed and placed where people will be during an incident

This is how you turn ad hoc, chaotic firefighting into repeatable, documented operations during a dark-out.

Preparedness + Structured Response: Two Halves of Resilience

To make these analog beacons effective, you need to balance pre-incident preparedness with structured incident response.

1. Incident Preparedness for ICS Environments

Preparing for cyber incidents in industrial environments should include:

Asset-aware planning: Identify critical systems, safety functions, and dependencies. Your runbooks should reflect real equipment and network segments, not generic placeholders.
Pre-authorized decisions: Define who can shut down, isolate, or switch to manual controls, and under what conditions.
Offline documentation: Maintain updated paper copies of network diagrams, contact lists, and key procedures.
Training for non-specialists: Many people touching ICS operations are not security experts. Your paper beacons must be understandable by any on-shift operator.

2. Structured Incident Response

When an outage hits, structured response means:

Clear phase-based actions (detect, contain, recover)
Defined roles and handoffs between operations, engineering, IT, OT security, legal, and management
Documented communication flows (who informs whom, when, and how)
Simple, repeatable checklists to avoid missed steps

Runbooks are the bridge between these two worlds: you prepare them in calm times so they can structure your response in crisis.

The Power of Runbooks: From Chaos to Consistency

Runbooks are the practical backbone of industrial incident response. When well designed, they:

Convert tribal knowledge into documented, shareable steps
Provide a shared reference for multi-disciplinary teams under stress
Enable consistent, auditable execution across shifts and sites
Reduce reliance on a few “heroes” who know everything by memory

Instead of everyone improvising, runbooks make it possible for any trained team member to:

Open the right guide
Follow the branching logic
Execute and record actions in a structured way

Your runbook strategy is what turns a stack of papers into a true signal lantern.

Designing a Solid Runbook Strategy

A strong strategy for ICS runbooks includes several building blocks.

1. Clear Templates

Standardization is key. Every runbook should share a common structure, for example:

Purpose & Scope
- What this runbook is for
- When to use it / when not to use it
Prerequisites & Safety Notes
- PPE requirements, safety system checks, required approvals
Quick Triage Checklist (First 5–15 Minutes)
- Simple yes/no questions to confirm you’re in the right scenario
Branching Decision Tree
- If X → go to Section A
- If Y → go to Section B
Step-by-Step Actions
- Numbered steps with clear roles (Operator, OT Engineer, IT, etc.)
Communication & Escalation
- Who to call, in what order, with what minimum information
Recording & Evidence
- What to log by hand (timestamps, systems, actions taken)
Recovery & Validation Steps
- Criteria for declaring partial/complete recovery
Lessons Learned Prompts
- Simple questions to fill in post-incident to improve the runbook

2. Branching Logic for Real-World Complexity

ICS incidents rarely follow a neat script. Your runbooks must handle messy scenarios with:

Different plant modes (normal, maintenance, startup, shutdown)
Different severities (suspected issue vs. confirmed compromise vs. safety risk)
Different visibility levels (network tools available vs. completely offline)

Use flowcharts and decision tables in the paper beacons so teams can quickly answer:

"Is this likely an IT-only incident or affecting control systems?"
"Are safety systems behaving normally?"
"Do we have reliable network visibility?"

Each answer should guide them to the next page, step, or sub-runbook.

3. Regular Maintenance and Field Testing

Runbooks decay quickly if they’re not maintained. A solid strategy includes:

Ownership: Assign a named owner for each runbook (by role, not just name).
Review cadence: Quarterly or semi-annual reviews, plus after every major incident.
Field-testing: Use exercises and simulations to validate clarity and realism.
Version control: Mark print dates and version numbers so during a crisis, teams can confirm they’re using the latest copy.

The goal is living documents, not static manuals.

Pre-Event Joint Exercises: Lighting the Lantern Together

Even the best runbook is just ink on paper without practice.

To truly prepare ICS defenders, recovery teams need to collaborate professionally before an event:

Joint tabletop exercises
Walkthroughs on the plant floor
Simulated outages or cyber-attack scenarios

These pre-event exercises:

Build trust and working relationships across OT, IT, security, and operations
Expose cultural, political, and technical barriers before they matter
Surface missing steps, unrealistic assumptions, and gaps in authority
Train non-technical leaders on what to expect and how to support the response

Each exercise should have a clear goal:

Validate a specific runbook
Test cross-team communication flows
Practice decision-making under ambiguity

You are not just testing technology—you are teaching people to use the analog lantern together in the dark.

Integrating Runbooks with Incident Workflows and Tracking

Paper beacons don’t exist in isolation. They must fit into your broader incident workflow.

Even in degraded conditions, you can usually:

Use local logs or simple forms to track actions and timings
Capture photos of filled-out paper checklists for later digital entry
Synchronize with central incident tracking once connectivity is restored

When systems are available, runbooks can also be mirrored in your digital tooling:

Ticket templates that mirror runbook steps
Checklists embedded in incident management platforms
Dashboards that highlight who owns each step

The key is alignment:

The paper version must be fully usable on its own
The digital version should extend, not replace, the analog guidance

This integration improves coordination, accountability, and recovery speed—without making you dependent on any single tool.

Putting It All Together: Your Own Signal Lanterns

Designing handheld paper beacons for ICS incidents is not about going backward to a pre-digital age. It’s about adding a resilient layer to your incident response capability.

To start:

Identify the top 5–10 realistic outage scenarios for your industrial environment.
Draft short, role-aware runbooks using a common template and clear branching logic.
Print and distribute them to control rooms, maintenance shops, and incident response kits.
Exercise them jointly with OT, IT, engineering, and leadership.
Continuously refine based on lessons learned and technology changes.

In the end, the measure of success is simple:

When power flickers
When HMIs crash
When networks segment and dashboards vanish

…can your teams still act confidently, consistently, and safely?

If the answer is yes, then your organization has more than documents. It has analog incident train station signal lanterns—trusted beacons that cut through the dark and guide everyone safely home.