ICS Cybersecurity Threats Continue to Rise—Severity Reaches All-Time High

by Gary Mintchell | Aug 27, 2021 | Automation, Security

This reminds me of other technologies I’ve seen transition from few users to industry standard seemingly overnight. This latest survey from Nozomi Networks and SANS Institute finds industrial organizations are leveraging the cloud as they mature cybersecurity defenses and prioritize control system reliability. However, threats remain high and are growing in severity. In response, a growing majority of organizations have significantly matured their security postures since the last SANS OT/ICS survey in 2019. From the report: In spite of the progress, almost half (48%) don’t know whether their organizations had been compromised. The Nozomi Networks-sponsored survey echoes Nozomi Networks’ own experiences with customers worldwide.

“It’s concerning to see that nearly half of this year’s survey respondents don’t know if they’ve been attacked when visibility and detection solutions are readily available to provide that awareness,” said Nozomi Networks Co-founder and CPO Andrea Carcano. “Threats may be increasing in severity, but new technologies and frameworks for defeating them are available and the survey found that more organizations are proactively using them. Still, there’s work to be done. We encourage others to adopt a post-breach mindset pre-breach and strengthen their security and operational resiliency before an attack.”

Cyber threats to OT environments continue to rise and threat severity is at an all-time high.

• Most respondents (69.8%) rated the risk to their OT environment as high or severe (up from 51.2% in 2019).
• Ransomware and financially motivated cybercrimes topped the list of threat vectors (54.2%) followed by nation-state sponsored cyberattacks (43.1%). Unprotected devices and things added to the network came in third (cited by 31.3% of survey respondents).
• Of the 15% of survey respondents who indicated they had experienced a breach in the last 12 months, a concerning 18.4% said the engineering workstation was an initial infection vector.
• Nearly half of all respondents (48%) did not know whether their organizations had been compromised and only 12% were confident that they hadn’t had an incident.
• In general, external connections are the dominant access vector (49%) with remote access services identified as the most prevalent reported initial access vector for incidents (36.7%).

This year’s survey found most organizations are taking ICS threats seriously and making solid progress in maturing their security postures to address them. Over the last two years organizations have improved monitoring and threat intelligence capabilities. They are moving away from traditional indicator-based defense capabilities and moving toward threat hunting and hypothesis-based security models. They’re also focusing on data loss prevention.

• 47% say their control system security budget increased over the past two years.
• Almost 70% have a monitoring program in place for OT security.
• 51% say they are now detecting compromises within the first 24 hours of an incident. The majority say they move from detection to containment within 6 to 24 hours.
• 9% have conducted a security audit of their OT/control systems or networks in the past year and almost a third (29.5%) have now implemented a continual assessment program.
• 50% say they have vendor-provided ICS-specific threat intelligence feeds and there is less reliance (36%) on IT threat intelligence providers.
• OT SOC adoption is up by a sharp 11% from 2019 to 2021, re-emphasizing the focus away from traditional indicator-based defense capabilities and more toward a threat hunting and hypothesis-based security model.
• Data loss prevention technologies also saw a sharp increase in deployment (11%).
• As process reliability becomes a top concern, 34% say they’re implementing zero-trust principles and an additional 31% say they plan to.

ICS is Getting Cloudy

Adoption of cloud-native technologies and services transformed the IT industry. This year’s survey found similar impacts are also beginning to be felt in the OT environment.

• 1% of all survey respondents indicate they are using some cloud-based services for OT/ICS systems.
• Almost all (91%) are using cloud technologies to directly support ICS operations (combining remote monitoring configuration and analysis; cloud services supporting OT; and remote control/logic).
• All respondents using cloud technologies are using cloud services for at least one type of cybersecurity function (company NOC/SOC, business continuity and MSSP support).
• Respondents consider cloud assets relatively secure, with only 13% of responses classifying them as risky.

To learn more about the latest trends in OT/ICS cybersecurity:

• Download A SANS 2021 Survey: OT/ICS Cybersecurity

The SANS Institute was established in 1989 as a cooperative research and education organization. SANS is the most trusted and, by far, the largest provider of training and certification to professionals at governments and commercial institutions world-wide. Renowned SANS instructors teach over 50 different courses at more than 200 live cyber security training events as well as online. GIAC, an affiliate of the SANS Institute, validates employee qualifications via 30 hands-on, technical certifications in information security. The SANS Technology Institute, a regionally accredited independent subsidiary, offers master’s degrees in cyber security. SANS offers a myriad of free resources to the InfoSec community including consensus projects, research reports, and newsletters; it also operates the Internet’s early warning system–the Internet Storm Center. At the heart of SANS are the many security practitioners, representing varied global organizations from corporations to universities, working together to help the entire information security community. (www.SANS.org)

• Here are a few responses to questions about the report:

1 What were the most surprising things you found in the report?

Chris Grove – Technology Evangelist – Nozomi Networks

Positive: It was a pleasant surprise to see that a large group of respondents (40.1%) have embraced cloud-base services. It’s a trend that Nozomi Networks has seen in the field and one that we have responded to with our own cloud-based security offerings. As Industrial and critical infrastructure organizations embrace IoT and converge their OT and IT efforts, they must be able to protect thousands of devices quickly and cost-effectively from threats in real-time and ensure ongoing operational resilience. Cloud-based technologies make that possible. It’s also encouraging to see the majority are confident in the security of their cloud assets. We believe ICS organizations will continue to adopt cloud technologies and the adoption of cloud-base security solutions will grow significantly over the next few years. 

Negative: It’s alarming to see that detection and response is still a significant issue for organizations. In fact, the problem seems to have grown since the previous survey (48% of survey participants did not know whether they’d had an incident vs. 42% in 2019). Solutions are available to address this problem and adopting them should be a top priority. 

Mark Bristow – Author – A SANS 2021 Survey: OT/ICS Cybersecurity

I found three things particularly striking in the report results.

●      The level of adoption of cloud technologies for operational outcomes was striking.  Two years ago, cloud adoption was not being seriously discussed and now 49% are using it.

●      Incident visibility and confidence is not high.  48% of respondents could not attest that they didn’t have an incident.  A further 90% of these incidents had some level of operational impact.

●      18% of incidents involved the engineering workstation.  This is a critical piece of equipment and having this involved in so many incidents is troubling.

2 What are three things you think ICS operators need to focus on moving forward to protect themselves?

Chris Grove, Nozomi Networks: Considering Ransomware is such a pervasive issue; it might be a first concern for many operators. Starting off with some tabletop exercises, operators would be able to identify areas where improvements can be made.  Typically, one area that gets highlighted is the need for a systematic risk assessment that details likely points of entry and identifies ways to harden the target. Sometimes this is in the form of patching, network segmentation, policies, procedures, etc.  In almost all cases, increased visibility makes everything easier to manage. From having a detailed asset inventory, to monitoring network traffic patterns, to inspecting traffic for attacks or operational anomalies…. visibility is a crucial component of successfully defending operations. Finally, the third and final thing that operators should consider is Consequence Reduction. As part of a post-Breach mindset, operators should consider the fact that eventually the attackers will breach the perimeter, and one should be prepared for that day.  How do we limit the blast radius of the attack? How do we hold them at bay, and subsequently eradicate them from the system? How do we carefully maintain, safely shutdown, or restore operations potentially affected by the breach? These are tough questions to be asked before that day comes.

Mark Bristow, SANS: 

·       It’s great that we now have monitoring programs in place, but we are still mostly looking at the IT aspects of our OT environments.  We need to be correlating our IT and OT security telemetry as well as process data to truly understand potential impacts to safety and operations.

·       Focus on fundamentals.  Too many respondents do not have a formal program for asset identification and inventory.  Without this foundational step, further security investments may be invalid or misplaced.

·       Ransomware is a huge risk, but it’s not one that is specifically targeting ICS.  A malicious actor who is specifically targeting your ICS environment will not be as blunt or noisy as ransomware is, and we are struggling to defend against ransomware. 

Zero Day Vulnerabilities in Industrial Control Systems Highlight the Challenges of Securing Critical Infrastructure

by Gary Mintchell | Jul 16, 2021 | Automation, Security

Security and industrial control system vulnerabilities spurred many news releases and PR inquiries offering quotes given the wide publicity of the latest ransomware attacks hitting industrial infrastructure. A zero day disclosure of multiple vulnerabilities in Schneider Electric’s industrial control systems (ICS) exemplifies the real-world struggles facing the critical infrastructure ecosystem. 

I first met Marty Edwards when he was with Idaho National Labs. He’s now with Tenable and wrote this blog post regarding the Schneider Electric vulnerabilities. At the end of the post is a statement from Schneider Electric about its situation.

Quoting from the post:

The vulnerabilities — which affect the company’s EcoStruxure Control Expert, EcoStruxure Process Expert, SCADAPack REmoteConnect x70 and Modicon M580 and M340 control products — pose several risks, including the possibility of complete authentication bypass, arbitrary code execution and loss of confidentiality and integrity. 

Tenable’s Zero Day Research is one of several vendors to have disclosed vulnerabilities to Schneider via standard disclosure practices and you can view our technical report here. Although we are strong proponents of full disclosure, in this case we have chosen to withhold certain specific technical details from our public disclosure documents. Operational Technology (OT) systems have yet to advance their security posture to be on par with their IT counterparts, and as such this is a rare situation where full disclosure shouldn’t be followed. In our view, the risk of successful in-the-wild exploitation was too great and the critical infrastructure at risk was too sensitive for us to proceed with full disclosure with patches months away from being released by the vendor.

The factors surrounding the Schneider disclosure highlight the many challenges involved in securing critical infrastructure. Industrial control systems and other technologies used in the operational technology environment are notoriously difficult to develop patches for and deploy. Why? Because systems have to be taken down and thoroughly tested each time an update is made. Yet, the existing operating models for most OT environments, such as power plants, gas pipelines, manufacturing plants, leave little margin for downtime. It’s clear that more discussion industry wide is needed to determine whether the vendor parameters used for zero day disclosures in IT environments are appropriate for critical infrastructure.

Addressing potential solutions, Edwards continues:

We believe it’s incumbent on the broad range of international stakeholders — including government bodies, law enforcement agencies, researchers, vendors and the owners and operators of critical infrastructure facilities — to prioritize global collaboration with an eye toward developing best practices for securing OT systems that can be applied regardless of geography. 

We believe these discussions need to recognize that OT vendors and operators have much to learn from their IT counterparts and need to become more adept at developing and managing the software underpinning crucial systems. Make no mistake — the onus does not fall solely on the owners and operators of critical infrastructure environments. Vendors need to be held responsible for continually bug hunting and doing quality assurance on their own software, dedicating resources to effectively managing vulnerability disclosures and speeding up update release times. 

Further:

In the U.S., we’ve already seen positive movement in the form of the May 12 Executive Order on Improving the Nation’s Cybersecurity from the Biden administration, which calls for software supply chain security guidance to incorporate vulnerability disclosure programs, and the May 18 White House fact sheet, which states “[c]ybersecurity is a core part of resilience and building infrastructure of the future.”

He offers these immediate actions we can take:

Three action items for securing critical infrastructure environments

There is no magic bullet for securing OT environments. Just as with IT security, it comes down to nailing the basics. And we’re well aware that the simplicity of the guidance belies the complexity of actually implementing the recommendations. Nonetheless, we believe these action items bear repeating, as they are foundational to any sound cybersecurity strategy, particularly when systems cannot be updated:

1. Implement a defense-in-depth posture. Critical infrastructure environments cannot rely on the security of any given device. Organizations need to implement a robust security architecture with compensating controls to protect the devices that are most at risk.
2. Develop strong governance and disaster recovery policies. These are essential for dealing with ransomware and other forms of cyberattack, and must take into account not just the technologies but also the people and processes in place in any given organization. Exercise and test your backup plans before you need them. Because the cyber skills shortage is particularly acute in OT environments, achieving this level of governance remains challenging for many organizations.
3. Choose technologies wisely. Without the right people and policies in place, it’s impossible to get the full value out of any technology you purchase. At the same time, there are certain capabilities to seek out in your technology choices. For example, the OT environment requires the same level of real-time, continuous analysis as can be found in the IT world. OT operators need to implement technologies that give them the kind of detection and recovery capabilities necessary to circumvent sophisticated threat actors. 

Schneider Electric has also provided the below statement about the disclosure. If you have any questions for their team, please reach out to [email protected] and Thomas Eck [email protected].

“Recently, multiple cybersecurity research firms made available to Schneider Electric the research they had performed on the cybersecurity of industrial PLC engineering software EcoStruxure Control Expert. The research intended to demonstrate the theoretical possibility of compromising industrial controllers under certain conditions, such as when an attacker has already compromised the engineering workstation or has unauthorized access to the targeted controller network.

Schneider Electric is committed to collaborating openly and transparently. In this case, we have collaborated with these researchers to validate the research and to assess its true impact. Our mutual findings demonstrate that while the discovered vulnerabilities affect Schneider Electric offers, it is possible to mitigate the potential impacts by following standard guidance, specific instructions; and in some cases, the fixes provided by Schneider Electric to remove the vulnerability.

As always, we appreciate and applaud independent cybersecurity research because, as in this case, it helps the global manufacturing industry strengthen our collective ability to prevent and respond to cyber-attacks. Working together has allowed us to improve our understanding of potential weaknesses in EcoStruxure Control Expert. It enabled us to disclose this vulnerability in a timely, responsible manner so that our customers and end-users can better protect their operations, assets, and people. Together, we continue to encourage the ecosystem of automation suppliers, cybersecurity solution providers, and end-users to collaborate to reduce cybersecurity risks; and support our customers to ensure they have implemented cybersecurity best practices across their operations and supply chains.”