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

How are packets formed?

To fully comprehend what is occurring in the network, let's do a quick packet 101. Packets are byte-sized relays of data, and they carry information between a source asset and a destination asset. Focusing on the traffic that powers the internet, protocols such as Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) and Internet Protocol (IP) make up the well-known acronym TCP/IP. These relays of data route through a series of switches and are reassembled, allowing us to send emails, navigate websites, download patches for software, stream movies, monitor elevators, manage trains, manufacture products, produce energy, and many more interesting and dynamic things.

To fully understand packets and how they work, it is important to understand how they flow through the layers of the Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) model. In the mid-80s, the OSI model was created and adopted to set a standard for describing the seven layers that systems use in order to communicate over...