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

Navigating IDS security monitoring

So far, we have installed Wireshark, learned about and configured a SPAN/mirror port, and installed a "passive" TAP. This has all led to this section. For those of you who are "purists" that may doubt the veracity of passive monitoring, note that various vendor technologies have been widely adopted and are encountered in almost all pentest engagements. I guess there is something to be said about a company's security maturity: as they engage in third-party pentests, it would be safe to say that these same companies invest in new monitoring tools for their industrial networks.

In this section, we will touch on the various vendors in the IDS security monitoring space, provide a high-level overview of what they typically detect, how they plug into the broader security suite of tools for events and alerting, and learn how to bypass these products and go undetected during a pentesting engagement. This is because it is quite...