Posts Tagged ‘SCADA’
Wednesday, September 3, 2014 @ 05:09 PM gHale
By Gregory Hale
It wasn’t too long ago when industrial control systems (ICS) and supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) systems were in the scope of the bad guys. These systems, sometimes close to 30 years old and considered easy pickings, were suffering hacks, or threatened hacks, on a fairly regular basis.
The thing is, they still are.
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When you looked at the headlines a year or two ago, they talked about Stuxnet, Night Dragon, Shamoon, Saudi Aramco, RasGas, ExxonMobil, Shell, just to name a few. Now the news still talks about hack attacks, but they are of a different kind. This time the retail sector is in the crosshairs. Just look at Target, Neiman Marcus, and most recently Home Depot.
Home Depot is the latest retailer to suffer a major credit card data breach that may have started in late April or early May.
The Atlanta-based home improvement retailer is now working with banks and law enforcement to investigate “unusual activity” that would point to a hack.
It is easy to say this is just the retail sector and it doesn’t affect manufacturing, but that is not true. Just how should the manufacturing industry react to the point of sale (PoS) attacks going on in the retail sector?
The main thing is, security professionals in the industry should remain vigilant and keep their mind in the game and know an attack is just a click away.
“I have been watching the PoS issues, including several notifications from the NCCIC (National Cybersecurity and Communications Integration Center),” said Joel Langill, ICS cyber security consultant and founder of SCADAhacker.com. “I believe that this is ‘the retail industry’s Stuxnet.’ The recent Target and Neiman Marcus breach put these systems on the front page of the mainstream media, so all of those researchers shifted focus and are now having fun finding problems throughout these systems.”
Researchers, however are finding similarities between retail systems and ICS/SCADA systems.
“I think there is a lot of comparisons between the attacks hitting the PoS terminals and the manufacturing world,” said Graham Speake, vice president and chief product architect at NexDefense, Inc. “While the attackers are obviously after credit card information in these attacks, it does show the sophistication of the attackers. Like an industrial control system, the PoS network is normally a separate network with links to the main business network. The lack of attention to the PoS network in terms of what communications are occurring and egress monitoring, a fairly static network with real time devices on it and devices that are not updated/upgraded frequently are also characteristics of industrial control networks.”
In the dynamic and evolving security environment, bad guys continue to find new ways to get into systems, but these attackers are not moving from industry to industry like a bunch of 7-year-olds chasing a ball while playing a soccer game. In most cases, these are professional attackers on a very specific mission going after their target.
“I don’t believe that it is the same set of threat actors, so manufacturing should not lower their guard thinking that the bad guys have shifted targets — it is a new set of bad guys with the same ones still targeting manufacturing,” Langill said. “Havex (Dragonfly, Energetic Bear, Crouching Yeti) should have shown this, and should have opened everyone’s eyes to the new tactics of exploiting ‘trusted relationships.’”
“Owners of PoS networks had put in defenses to protect that data, even regulated with PCI standards, but the lack of visibility allowed multiple breaches (even after the Target warnings),” Speake said. “Attackers could turn their attention to ICS networks and, using similar attack tools and methods, gain access to these networks, not for credit card scraping but for extortion or disruption.”
Friday, August 22, 2014 @ 01:08 PM gHale
The move to using open standards such as Ethernet, TCP/IP, and web technologies in supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) and process control networks has begun to expose these systems to the same cyberattacks that have wreaked so much havoc on corporate information systems.
That is why aeSolutions is offering a course that provides a detailed look at how the ANSI/ISA99 standards can help protect your critical control systems. It also explores the procedural and technical differences between the security for traditional IT environments and those solutions appropriate for SCADA or plant floor environments. Cost of the course is $1,510.
This course is required for the ISA99/IEC 62443 Cybersecurity Fundamentals Specialist Certificate Program. You can register for the exam through ISA after completing the course.
Those who successfully complete this course and pass the exam receive the designation of ISA99/IEC 62443 Cybersecurity Fundamentals Specialist.
The course is Wednesday, September 17, at 8 a.m. to Thursday, September 18, at 4 p.m. at the JL Towers, 3800 Centerpoint Drive, Suite 620, Anchorage, AK 99503.
The course will allow you to :
• Discuss the principles behind creating an effective long term program security Interpret the ANSI/ISA99 industrial security guidelines and apply them to your operation
• Define the basics of risk and vulnerability analysis methodologies
• Describe the principles of security policy development
• Explain the concepts of defense in depth and zone/conduit models of security
• Analyze the current trends in industrial security incidents and methods hackers use to attack a system
• Define the principles behind the key risk mitigation techniques, including anti-virus and patch management, firewalls, and virtual private networks
You will cover:
• Understanding the Current Industrial Security Environment: What is Electronic Security for Industrial Automation and Control Systems? | How IT and the Plant Floor are Different and How They are the Same
• How Cyberattacks Happen: Understanding the Threat Sources | The Steps to Successful Cyberattacks
• Creating A Security Program: Critical Factors for Success/Understanding the ANSI/ISA-62443-2-1 (ANSI/ISA-99.02.01-2009)- Security for Industrial Automation and Control Systems: Establishing an Industrial Automation and Control Systems Security Program
• Risk Analysis: Business Rationale | Risk Identification, Classification, and Assessment | The DNSAM Methodology
• Addressing Risk with Security Policy, Organization, and Awareness: CSMS Scope | Organizational Security | Staff Training and Security Awareness
• Addressing Risk with Selected Security Counter Measures: Personnel Security | Physical and Environmental Security | Network Segmentation | Access Control
• Addressing Risk with Implementation Measures: Risk Management and Implementation | System Development and Maintenance | Information and Document Management
• Monitoring and Improving the CSMS: Compliance and Review | Improve and Maintain the CSMS
Classroom/Laboratory Exercises:
• Develop a business case for industrial security
• Conduct security threat analysis Investigate scanning and protocol analysis tools
• Apply basic security analysis tools software
Includes ISA Standards:
ANSI/ISA-62443-1-1 (ANSI/ISA-99.00.01-2007) – Security for Industrial Automation and Control Systems Part 1: Terminology, Concepts & Models
ANSI/ISA-62443-2-1 (ANSI/ISA-99.02.01-2009) – Security for Industrial Automation and Control Systems: Establishing an Industrial Automation and Control Systems Security Program
ANSI/ISA-62443-3-3 – Security for industrial automation and control systems: System security requirements and security levels
For more information, contact Jodi Pietrowski at aeSolutions.
Tuesday, August 12, 2014 @ 01:08 PM gHale
The National Institute of Standards and Technology wants to create a test bed to examine industrial control systems for cyber security vulnerabilities.
Industrial control systems (ICS) or SCADA (Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition) systems operate critical infrastructure, such as dams, gas plants, petroleum refineries and chemical manufacturing plants.
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Hackers can potentially wreak havoc with assaults on such systems. In late June, for example, a targeted malware attack on SCADA systems called Havex ended up discovered by the Industrial Control Systems Cyber Emergency Response Team (ICS-CERT) at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) that could have allowed intruders to take over Internet-connected systems.
NIST is trying to get ahead of attackers by developing a simulation system that emulates the operations of specific industrial situations.
The simulation rack will provide NIST’s researchers the opportunity to probe systems for flaws and examine the efficacy of certain network security approaches, including deep packet inspection of network traffic, encryption, user authentication, and security software like anti-virus protection.
In a request for information , NIST is soliciting feedback from vendors interested in designing and building simulation racks of SCADA systems for testing purposes.
Tuesday, June 24, 2014 @ 05:06 PM gHale
By Gregory Hale
You are under attack and you don’t even know it.
That was the subject of a demonstration and talk Tuesday entitled “ICS Security Today Awareness and Practice” at the 2014 Siemens Automation Summit.
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“We are trying to protect people, production, property, environment and the economy,” said Marc Ayala, senior technical advisor at security provider Cimation. He talked about how many people that are qualified and actually know something about enterprise security and the number he came up with was 50,000 true experts. When it comes to Industrial Control System (ICS) or Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) security, Ayala said there were “500 people that know ICS security.”
The industries most likely targeted, Ayala said, were energy and transportation.
One of the first things a user needs to accomplish is to evaluate risk, said Eric Forner, ICS/SCADA security engineer at Cimation.
Threats are coming from hackers that could be conducting automated attacks, or from nation states that develop exploits and know how control systems work, Forner said. A third area is from internal attacks, “which is more of a threat than the other two.”
Another area that is a big attack area and has the potential to get bigger is social media attacks, Ayala said.
All you have to do is send a person a malicious email with an attachment from a person they may be familiar with and that person now becomes a victim.
“That is the pivot point where an attacker can then go in and start viewing the system,” Ayala said. “You have to be very careful with who you connect with.”
Keeping bad guys out of the system is vital as the demonstration by Forner proved.
In the demo, Forner was able to bypass a firewall and jump right into a system and take it over.
Most firewalls are usually in place because a standard has told people to put them in, but they end up having an “allow anything command,” Forner said.
That ends up being important as Forner was able to use various commands to work his way through a PLC without too much of a problem.
But the way in to any system is through IP addresses found on the Internet, the researchers said.
One of the problems, Forner said, was the industry’s reliance on incredibly old Modbus/TCP protocol.
Port 502 is the Modbus TCP port and it is one of the top ports under attack,” Ayala said.
In the demo, there was a level transmitter that would shut the system down when the fluid reached a certain level, but when they issued a few commands to get into the system, they essentially owned the process.
When that happened all indicators showed the operator the tank was not at an overflow level and is actually decreasing, but in reality the tank ended up overflowing. They were able to override the safety interlock and take down the process.
As an extra added bonus, after overflowing the tank, the researchers then took command of the HMI in the system and downloaded a game of solitaire.
Yes, this was a demo at a conference, but that could be a real life experience that could cause an incident.
“Cyber security in ICS/SCADA is a life safety issue and must be treated as such,” Ayala said. “Safety is everywhere and it is constant. With all our total interconnections, safety is all the time now.”
Wednesday, June 4, 2014 @ 07:06 PM gHale
By Gregory Hale
There are heavy challenges facing automation professionals in the years to come and cyber security ranks up there at the top.
“There are issues like skills availability, working in remote locations and cyber security,” said Vimal Kapur, the brand new president of Honeywell Process Solutions (HPS) during his keynote address Tuesday at the 2014 Honeywell Users Group in San Antonio, TX. “We can’t ignore (cyber security). It is an undesired event and we have to do something about it.”
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Kapur, just named president of HPS in May, talked about trends and outlooks he sees in the industry. While newly named as president, Kapur has been with Honeywell for 25 years so he is very aware of industry nuances and trends.
One of the areas he wants to focus on collaborating to ensure global coverage as the world markets emerge from long standing recessions.
“China and the Americas continue to lead in capital spending, but Europe, Middle East and Asia (EMEA) and Asia Pacific are recovering,” he said.
Closer to home in North America, Kapur said natural gas is continuing its growth curve.
“The Americas oil and gas industries continue to dominate capital spending in the region, especially as they migrate to new natural gas sources,” said Kapur. “These changes have been having a profound impact for the past two or three years, and this trend is going to continue for several more years.”
He also pointed out how Honeywell will be able to leverage its capabilities in upstream oil and gas, midstream and downstream with new SCADA, RTU, DCS, safety, advanced and field instrumentation solutions.
Also understanding and designing the systems properly from the beginning is more vital now than it ever has been.
“Large capital expenditure projects are growing more complex, expensive and time-consuming. So instead of us coming in and adding automation and control at the end of a project before start-up, it’s becoming critical for us to execute automation and get it out of the critical path of these projects,” Kapur said.
Planning the project is one thing, but the next step is applying operational integrity and operational excellence.
“Being able to accomplish operational integrity means operating safely. Operational excellence means running a process more efficiently,” he said. “That all includes making people and assets safer, and running processes more reliably.”
One other trend Kapur discussed was cloud computing.
“Cloud computing in automation has huge potential,” Kapur said. “That is something that is happening now; not something that will happen in the future.”
Another trend is universality, Kapur said. By that he said there would be one universal device that handles multiple capabilities. A case in point is a smartphone that can handle computing, video, phone and general communications capabilities.
In the past one device could handle one function, but why not have one device that handles multiple functions.
He then translated that to the Honeywell environment where, in one case, he pointed to Universal IO which transformed from a single device to one that can handle multiple tasks.
Universal I/O and cloud computing capabilities form the core of the company’s Lean Execution of Automation Projects (LEAP) program for taking automation out of the critical path on customers’ projects.
The goal behind LEAP is to cut engineering time
- No repeat engineering
- Drives efficiency
- Lean execution
- Standardized processes and tools
Monday, April 28, 2014 @ 10:04 AM gHale
There is a directory traversal vulnerability affecting the InduSoft Web Studio application, according to a report on ICS-CERT.
Successful exploitation of this remotely exploitable vulnerability could allow remote execution of arbitrary code. This vulnerability ended up reported by the Zero Day Initiative (ZDI) who received the initial dispatch from security researcher John Leitch.
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Web Studio Version 7.1 suffers from the issue.
Successful exploitation of the reported vulnerability could allow an attacker to read files outside the web root and possibly perform arbitrary code execution. These actions can result in adverse application conditions and ultimately impact the production environment on which the supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) system works.
InduSoft Web Studio is a collection of automation tools to develop human-machine interfaces, SCADA systems, and embedded instrumentation systems.
InduSoft Web Studio often ends up integrated as a third-party component in other vendors’ products. According to Austin, TX-based InduSoft, Web Studio sees uses across several sectors including commercial facilities, critical manufacturing, energy, food and agriculture, healthcare and public health, and water and wastewater systems.
The NTWebServer (test web server installed with InduSoft Web Studio) contains a flaw that enables a malicious user to read files outside the web root. This can end up exploited to read APP files that may contain application passwords. It may be possible to achieve remote code execution by exfiltrating credentials for Web Studio itself, then using them to remotely administer the targeted instance to deploy attacker controlled server-side code.
CVE-2014-0780 is the case number assigned to this vulnerability, which has a CVSS v2 base score of 7.5.
No known public exploits specifically target this vulnerability. However, an attacker with a low skill would be able to exploit this vulnerability.
InduSoft did not intend for this web server to see action in real applications. It was a demonstration/training software (as stated in user manuals). They have created a mitigation for this vulnerability in InduSoft Web Studio v7.1+Service Pack 2+ Patch 4. Users may obtain this patch at the following location (you must log into your InduSoft account).
For more information, you can email InduSoft technical support.
Wednesday, March 26, 2014 @ 01:03 PM gHale
“Attacks on control systems are on the rise.” But “budgets for cyber security in SCADA ICS environments remain very slim, and organizations continue to be dependent on limited resources and staffing to detect breaches and attacks,” said Matt Luallen, SANS Institute Analyst and author of a control system survey.
SANS released results of its 2014 Survey on control system security, in which 268 IT professionals answered questions about their overall risk awareness, trends in threats and breaches, and effective means to mitigate vulnerabilities with regard to supervisory control and data acquisition/industrial control system (SCADA/ICS).
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In the year since SANS’ last survey on this topic, the number of entities with identified or suspected security breaches increased from 28 percent to almost 40 percent. Only 9 percent said they were sure they did not suffer a breach.
Organizations want to be able to protect their systems and assets, which include computer systems, networks, embedded controllers, control system communication protocols and various physical assets. Respondents also noted they strive to protect public safety; increase leadership risk awareness; and expand controls pertaining to asset identification, communication channels and centralized monitoring.
Still, quite a few organizations do not or cannot collect data from some of the most critical SCADA and ICS assets, and many depend on trained staff, not tools, to detect issues. The survey also found 16 percent of respondents have no process in place to detect vulnerabilities.
The survey did note a tighter merging of ICS security and IT security, which was once a huge barrier to overcome.
“Respondents indicated that ICS security is being performed by specialists reporting to both engineering and IT,” said Derek Harp, business operations lead for ICS programs at SANS. “This places a real priority on cross-departmental coordination, effectively bridging competencies and building (as well as assessing) skill in an organized manner.”