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

Building a script for brute-forcing SCADA

I am going to assume that by reading this book, you have a relative level of proficiency or exposure to programming/bash scripting. If not, I strongly recommend brushing up on bash scripting and/or Python. Two books that I personally recommend are as follows:

  • Cybersecurity Ops with bash, by Paul Troncone and Carl Albing, PhD
  • Black Hat Python, by Justin Seitz

These are great resources for you to get a good idea of how and what Bash and Python can do and perform. The biggest takeaway is that by reading this book and going through these chapters, you will learn how to make these scripting/programming languages useful inside your pentesting engagement.

I prefaced this section with the preceding note as I am going to try and make this process as painless as possible. As a disclaimer, I have to say that I am a developer at best, not a programmer by any means. I am making this distinction as programmers who decide to make their...