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

Preparing a pentest report

When preparing a report, it ultimately comes down to personal preference and, possibly, if you are working for a larger company, corporate branding. Getting the theme, icons, logos, and brands out of the way, at the core, there is a fundamental structure that should be used as a guideline to build your report against. Now, depending on your educational background, talking about report structure might come across as redundant; however, it is critical to build a clear and concise report that can be easily ingested by your customer because if they can't follow the flow of the report, it might be the last engagement you have with that client.

Story time

I spent many years working with, and for, Engineering Procurement Construction (EPC) companies. During that time, I became very familiar with search and replace all word processor functions. Building a reusable set of reporting templates is vital to a successful pentesting career. With each engagement...