In the new century, industrial control binds to ICT using wired media –and most recently wireless– and through the TCP/IP suite. While this offers significant advantages, it also has, unfortunately, some drawbacks. To address this, it is necessary to thoroughly study the Industrial Control Systems: Their Vulnerabilities and Solutions.

Vulnerabilities in industrial control systems

However, this innovative and beneficial union, has, as we have said, a big drawback: the vulnerabilities.

Las industrial infrastructure become critical and need to use extreme caution because, part of an SCI vulnerabilities of this affect you. So, the beneficial union of these elements becomes a risk which must be studied and stop.

Fue en el 2011 cuando las vulnerabilities in industrial control systems they became dormant, with the attack to Natanz. Since then, the maximum alert is and make the network and security audits corresponding to be aware on this issue is essential.

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Analyze the vulnerabilities

There are vulnerabilities at the organizational level. Some are:

  • There is no internal rules of designing OT systems.
  • That it does not exist monitoring systems adecuados.
  • That have been made or inadequate testing are performed.
  • There is scarce or even absence of adequate control procedures to modify software, hardware, technical documentation or firmware.
  • There is no redundancy of critical equipment.
  • That is taking out a policy for control and automation systems inadecuada.
  • That good maintenance is not carried out, appropriate revisions or parcheen equipment when necessary.
  • To the implementation guide for equipment OT is highly deficient - even sometimes non-existent-.

On the other hand, we have the technology or technical vulnerabilities:

  • Not improve the settings default software manufacturers, performing installations and executions without customizing.
  • Not to define network perimeters or do so inefficiently.
  • That there is no control communication flows.
  • Use of insecure protocols, as OPC, Profibus, Modbus…
  • That physical and remote access are inappropriate or configured wrong.
  • Have not upgraded appliances.
  • There are unnecessary functionality installed in critical equipment.

Propose and carry out the best solutions

To eliminate these vulnerabilities, or to avoid them if they don't exist, It is necessary to start, as we have said, by hiring a service of audit.

The first step will be to always determine what level of protection and cybersecurity you want to reach. So, a periodicity will be established to carry out other audits of control and improve the safety and efficiency of the services.

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For it, and taking into account that the own network audits they involve dangers, the ideal is to make them in a laboratory or pre-production environment. The problem with this that is in many cases it's not possible to create an exact replica of the real world and this, hopelessly, exposed.

Once analyzed the environment, we propose the most suitable system solutions in each case. Some are going to be doing a segmentation according to criticality and confidence levels, install and activate firewalls It capen activity of teams that untrusted, the use of one-way gateways that you develop control systems in inaccessible, IPSs which parcheen vulnerabilities, blocking of processes that are not authorized…

Vulnerabilities and solutions in industrial control systems can vary widely, so the first—and absolutely necessary—step is to conduct a good audit of network and security which determine the situation current before taking action.