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

Summary

In this chapter, we built an introductory functional lab, where we can develop logic inside our PLC and connect to real-world inputs and outputs to see how things react to certain environmental tests. This helps relay a fundamental understanding of how industrial systems operate and work. Building on these core concepts allows us to extend our lab to more complex scenarios. We used the engineering software to force inputs, and then we replicated the same behavior remotely with mbtget to convey how easy it is to change a simple on/off input on a controller.

Imagine what other industry processes operate this way, such as opening and closing valves on a water plant or opening a valve on a lye, also known as a sodium hydroxide, holding tank, and allowing it to flow into water treatment units, similar to the Florida City Water Supply hack on February 5, 2021. However, the Florida City Water Supply hack is more complex as it involved changing a concentration amount on an operator...