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

Analyzing packets for key information

In the previous section, part of our discussion was about utilizing display filters for protocols such as http, ftp, and nfs. Understanding how to apply these filters and extracting key data is crucial to a successful pentesting engagement. Additionally, understanding who is communicating with who on the network and quickly applying a filter to hone in on critical details are an absolute must and require ongoing practice to get good at performing traffic analysis. In the previous section, I supplied some links, and I just want to reiterate that you need to practice honing your skills. People refer to pentesters as cyber Samurai or digital ninjas: they practice daily in order to strengthen and master their skills. In this section, we will perform analyses on multiple packet captures to demonstrate how to approach a network packet capture file and extract the key information required to drive success to our assessment.

Note

One of the key elements...