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

Chapter 5: Span Me If You Can

In the previous chapter, we covered the importance of using open source research to build a profile of your client, their company, users, and technology. In this chapter, we are going to dive deeper down the rabbit hole and discuss out-of-band network monitoring. For the last few years, intrusion detection systems (IDS) have been dominating the industrial cybersecurity space.

Companies such as Security Matters (acquired by ForeScout), Indegy (bought by Tenable), Sentryo (bought by Cisco), CyberX (bought by Microsoft), Claroty, Nozomi Networks, SCADAfence, and many others have flourished. Money from venture capital (VC) and investment banking (IB) has been poured into the passive monitoring space to provide awareness about the importance of automation technology, and the impact it has on critical infrastructure has grown as well.

All this technology relies on the network infrastructure to be able to either use a Switch Port Analyzer (SPAN) or Test...