It is critical to secure the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) devices
because of potentially devastating consequences in case of an attack. Machine
learning and big data analytics are the two powerful leverages for analyzing
and securing the Internet of Things (IoT) technology. By extension, these
techniques can help improve the security of the IIoT systems as well. In this
paper, we first present common IIoT protocols and their associated
vulnerabilities. Then, we run a cyber-vulnerability assessment and discuss the
utilization of machine learning in countering these susceptibilities. Following
that, a literature review of the available intrusion detection solutions using
machine learning models is presented. Finally, we discuss our case study, which
includes details of a real-world testbed that we have built to conduct
cyber-attacks and to design an intrusion detection system (IDS). We deploy
backdoor, command injection, and Structured Query Language (SQL) injection
attacks against the system and demonstrate how a machine learning based anomaly
detection system can perform well in detecting these attacks. We have evaluated
the performance through representative metrics to have a fair point of view on
the effectiveness of the methods.