CAPEC (Common Attack Pattern Enumeration and Classification) is a project that focuses on enumerating and classifying common attack patterns on computer systems and providing a systematic approach to understanding and addressing the tactics used by attackers. Like CWE (Common Weakness Enumeration), CAPEC is an initiative of the computer security community and is maintained by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in the United States. Recently in version 3.9, the project has incorporated a number of attack patterns related to the industrial world.
This article aims to show the reader the use of these codes, such as those used at the identifier level in CVEs, CWEs, etc., and which are related to many of the jobs that are carried out on a daily basis in the industrial cybersecurity sector.
Currently, industrial infrastructures are suffering more attacks than ever before, and it is expected that attacks on these types of infrastructures will continue to grow exponentially in the coming years. This is why, throughout this article, an analysis will be made of a group of cybercriminals and their standard attack, showing how information can be obtained on the modus operandi, when and by what tactics and techniques they managed to attack an industrial infrastructure
The industrial environment, especially the energy sector, is one of sectors that is suffering the most from cyber-attacks. This trend has been increasing in recent years, as this is one of the most information-sensitive sectors and can cause major problems, both economically and socially.
One of the best examples of malware attacks is BlackEnergy. This malware became known for being able to compromise several electricity distributors on 23 December 2015, causing households in the Ivano-Frankvisk region of Ukraine (a population of around 1.5 million) to be without electricity.
For this reason, due to seriousness of this type of cyberattacks, it is necessary to continue researching and investing in industrial cybersecurity, to reduce the damage caused by this type of cyber-attack in industrial environments.
IoT networks are very useful for everyday life, but their use is not limited only to this type of environment; there are industrial environments where this type of networks can benefit connectivity between industrial devices and provide capabilities that other types of networks could not. The 3rd Generation Partnership Project or 3GPP developed the NB-IoT protocol, a protocol for when networks with higher performance, higher speed and high interconnectivity capacity between devices are required. This protocol can work both in IoT devices and in IoT devices in the industrial environment (IIoT).
Article summarizing the Industrial Control Systems (ICS) alerts published during the year 2023 on the INCIBE-CERT website, with emphasis on different indicators, such as criticality, type of attack, etc.
The motivation is to give the published notices an added value, in order to compile the information of the whole year as a logbook. In addition, this type of article was well received in previous years, showing in several talks the graphs of the article to argue the exponential growth of vulnerabilities in ICS.
The OPC UA (OPC unified architecture) communication protocol is the most modern standard presented by OPC Foundation. Currently, the OPC UA protocol is one of the most widely used in industrial environments, due to its ability to interconnect different devices, regardless of their base protocol and vendor.
Throughout this article, a technical assessment of the protocol will be conducted, explaining in detail the technical capabilities that allow a high level of cybersecurity to be implemented without causing performance losses in the devices.
Second part of the Top 20 mitigations for industrial environments. This part will focus on mitigations related to network architecture, industrial protocols, network configuration and vulnerability scanning.
In the industrial world, there are a large number of systems, equipment, networks, areas, ducts, cloud environments, IT-OT environments, etc. In recent years, the number of attacks on industrial environments has been growing exponentially, and not only on purely industrial environments, but also on corporate environments that are connected to industrial environments. These IT environments being access points for attackers due to this IT/OT connectivity.