Book Image

Industrial Cybersecurity - Second Edition

By : Pascal Ackerman
Book Image

Industrial Cybersecurity - Second Edition

By: Pascal Ackerman

Overview of this book

With Industrial Control Systems (ICS) expanding into traditional IT space and even into the cloud, the attack surface of ICS environments has increased significantly, making it crucial to recognize your ICS vulnerabilities and implement advanced techniques for monitoring and defending against rapidly evolving cyber threats to critical infrastructure. This second edition covers the updated Industrial Demilitarized Zone (IDMZ) architecture and shows you how to implement, verify, and monitor a holistic security program for your ICS environment. You'll begin by learning how to design security-oriented architecture that allows you to implement the tools, techniques, and activities covered in this book effectively and easily. You'll get to grips with the monitoring, tracking, and trending (visualizing) and procedures of ICS cybersecurity risks as well as understand the overall security program and posture/hygiene of the ICS environment. The book then introduces you to threat hunting principles, tools, and techniques to help you identify malicious activity successfully. Finally, you'll work with incident response and incident recovery tools and techniques in an ICS environment. By the end of this book, you'll have gained a solid understanding of industrial cybersecurity monitoring, assessments, incident response activities, as well as threat hunting.
Table of Contents (26 chapters)
1
Section 1: ICS Cybersecurity Fundamentals
6
Section 2:Industrial Cybersecurity – Security Monitoring
12
Section 3:Industrial Cybersecurity – Threat Hunting
17
Section 4:Industrial Cybersecurity – Security Assessments and Intel
19
Chapter 15: Industrial Control System Risk Assessments
22
Section 5:Industrial Cybersecurity – Incident Response for the ICS Environment

Passive security monitoring explained

The essence of passive security monitoring lies in the passive part of its name. Truly passive security monitoring does not interact with the environment being monitored. Interactions such as changing files or settings on a host system or sending packets out on a network are avoided, but instead a watch-and-observe approach is taken whereby we monitor files and settings on a host system for changes, or we can observe network traffic to find signs of malicious activity.

Forms of passive security monitoring include the following:

  • Network packet sniffing for the detection of malicious activity
  • The collection and correlation of event logs to identify malicious behavior/activity
  • Host-based security solution agents collecting system statistics to discover malicious activities

We will now discuss the three main methods of passive security monitoring techniques.

Network packet sniffing

Network packet sniffing is the practice...