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

Modbus crash course

Modbus was a serial protocol that was published in the 1970s as a means of connecting equipment in an industrial process over a common bus. Since Modbus's publication, there have been many evolutions of the protocol and variants. This is largely due to the openness and flexibility of the protocol standard. As this protocol is the most broadly used for connecting industrial equipment, you can imagine there have been many books and papers written on the subject. We are going to focus specifically on Modbus TCP and the various commands and functions that can be used. I strongly recommend reading up on the history and evolution of Modbus, as you will gain a deeper insight into how industry has adapted this protocol to suite their process and specific operational needs. Follow this link to get a brief history of Modbus: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OuM28tp5wXc.

Modbus TCP encapsulates Modbus RTU packets inside of a TCP packet, allowing data to be exchanged...