Industrial threats

Kaspersky Lab ICS CERT publishes the findings of its research on the threat landscape for industrial automation systems conducted during the second half of 2017. The main objective of these publications is to provide information support to incident response teams, enterprise information security staff and researchers in the area of industrial facility security.

We confront hundreds of thousands of new threats every day and we can see that threat actors are on a constant lookout for new attack opportunities. According to our research, connecting a software license management token to a computer may open a hidden remote access channel for an attacker.

2017 was one of the most intense in terms of incidents affecting the information security of industrial systems. Security researchers discovered and reported hundreds of new vulnerabilities, warned of new threat vectors in ICS and technological processes, provided data on accidental infections of industrial systems and detected targeted attacks.

Kaspersky Lab Industrial Control Systems Cyber Emergency Response Team (Kaspersky Lab ICS CERT) publishes the results of its research on the threat landscape for industrial automation systems for the first six months of 2017.

In late 2016, the Kaspersky Lab ICS CERT reported on phishing attacks that were primarily targeting industrial companies from the metallurgy, electric power, construction, engineering and other sectors. As further research demonstrated, this was just part of a bigger story that began much earlier and is unlikely to end any time soon.

On average, in the second half of 2016 Kaspersky Lab products across the globe blocked attempted attacks on 39.2% of protected computers that Kaspersky Lab ICS CERT classifies as being part of industrial enterprise technology infrastructure.

The telecoms sector is under fire on all sides – hit by direct attacks on organizations and networks, indirect attacks in search of subscribers, and collateral damage from unrelated, targeted campaigns. This report reveals the many layers of vulnerability.

Expansion of the Internet makes ICS easier prey to attackers. Taking into account that initially many ICS solutions and protocols were designed for isolated environments, such availability often provides a malicious user with multiple capabilities to cause impact to the infrastructure behind the ICS due to lack of security controls.

The data collected from Kaspersky Lab products shows that the tools used to attack businesses differ from those used against home users. Let’s have a look back at the major incidents of 2015 and at the new trends we have observed in information security within the business environment.

Microsoft releases six Security Bulletins today, three of them “critical” remote code execution, to fix almost thirty CVE-enumerated vulnerabilities. None of them are known to be publicly exploited, and only a couple are known to be publicly discussed.

In this post, let’s examine several additional plugins more closely, targeting details around BE2 Siemens exploitation, and some of their unusual coding failures.

Industrial systems, critically important installations and other key facilities require the very latest protection technologies.

Our investigation and research of Duqu malware continues.

First of all, we feel it necessary to clarify some of the confusion surrounding the files and their names related to this incident. To get a full understanding of the situation you only need to know that we’re talking about just two malicious programs here (at a minimum) – the main module and a keylogger.

This work-in-progress investigation tracks the Duqu Trojan and offers some answers to commonly asked questions.