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 learned what SPAN/mirroring and TAPs are, as well as the importance of understanding how they fit into the ICS ecosystem. Knowing what to look for on the network and how to interact with it is key to having a successful outcome. Discovering what traffic is communicating and exchanging data allows us to build out a network topology of the assets the client has in their network. Utilizing technologies such as Wireshark, TShark, and Tcpdump to listen to and review the traffic in real time is required during an engagement. More advanced technologies, such as the IDS vendors listed in this chapter, will even divulge auto-discovered vulnerabilities.

In the next chapter, which is all about listening to a SPAN or TAP on the network, we will build packet captures that will allow us to analyze and dissect protocols being passed on the network. This is the secret sauce that IDS companies use to build out their product. This is an arms race for protocol dissectors...