Book Image

Pentesting Industrial Control Systems

By : Paul Smith
Book Image

Pentesting Industrial Control Systems

By: Paul Smith

Overview of this book

The industrial cybersecurity domain has grown significantly in recent years. To completely secure critical infrastructure, red teams must be employed to continuously test and exploit the security integrity of a company's people, processes, and products. This is a unique pentesting book, which takes a different approach by helping you gain hands-on experience with equipment that you’ll come across in the field. This will enable you to understand how industrial equipment interacts and operates within an operational environment. You'll start by getting to grips with the basics of industrial processes, and then see how to create and break the process, along with gathering open-source intel to create a threat landscape for your potential customer. As you advance, you'll find out how to install and utilize offensive techniques used by professional hackers. Throughout the book, you'll explore industrial equipment, port and service discovery, pivoting, and much more, before finally launching attacks against systems in an industrial network. By the end of this penetration testing book, you'll not only understand how to analyze and navigate the intricacies of an industrial control system (ICS), but you'll also have developed essential offensive and defensive skills to proactively protect industrial networks from modern cyberattacks.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
1
Section 1 - Getting Started
5
Section 2 - Understanding the Cracks
9
Section 3 - I’m a Pirate, Hear Me Roar
15
Section 4 -Capturing Flags and Turning off Lights

Introduction to NMAP

Coming from the automation controls space, I used NMAP early on in my career to troubleshoot new technology that was starting to adopt TCP-based protocols. Finding hardware that had open ports that had zero documentation was commonplace in the mid-00s. Over the next two decades, I followed this project and watched it grow into the foundational tool it is today. Not only is it used for finding open ports, but it can also be used to perform operating system fingerprinting, application identification, and many more features.

In this section, we are going to install and run NMAP against our lab environment. We will identify open ports and the services running on these ports. Scanning the network for assets and open ports is fundamental for gaining a foothold and a pivot point inside the industrial network when in the field working on a client's network. As said in the previous chapter about Wireshark being the number one tool for a pentester, I would say NMAP...