Biblio

Nowadays, the industrial control systems (ICS) face many challenges, where security is becoming one of the most crucial. This fact is caused by new connected environment, which brings among new possibilities also new vulnerabilities, threats, or possible attacks. The criminal acts in the ICS area increased over the past years exponentially, which caused the loss of billions of dollars. This also caused classical Intrusion Detection Systems and Intrusion Prevention Systems to evolve in order to protect among IT also ICS networks. However, these systems need sufficient data such as traffic logs, protocol information, attack patterns, anomaly behavior marks and many others. To provide such data, the requirements for the test environment are summarized in this paper. Moreover, we also introduce more than twenty common vulnerabilities across the ICS together with information about possible risk, attack vector (point), possible detection methods and communication layer occurrence. Therefore, the paper might be used as a base-ground for building sufficient data generator for machine learning and artificial intelligence algorithms often used in ICS/IDS systems.

One of the main security concerns of enterprise-level organizations which provide network-based services is combating with complex cybersecurity attacks like advanced persistent threats (APTs). The main features of these attacks are being multilevel, multi-step, long-term and persistent. Also they use an intrusion kill chain (IKC) model to proceed the attack steps and reach their goals on targets. Traditional security solutions like firewalls and intrusion detection and prevention systems (IDPSs) are not able to prevent APT attack strategies and block them. Recently, deception techniques are proposed to defend network assets against malicious activities during IKC progression. One of the most promising approaches against APT attacks is Moving Target Defense (MTD). MTD techniques can be applied to attack steps of any abstraction levels in a networked infrastructure (application, host, and network) dynamically for disruption of successful execution of any on the fly IKCs. In this paper, after presentation and discussion on common introduced IKCs, one of them is selected and is used for further analysis. Also, after proposing a new and comprehensive taxonomy of MTD techniques in different levels, a mapping analysis is conducted between IKC models and existing MTD techniques. Finally, the effect of MTD is evaluated during a case study (specifically IP Randomization). The experimental results show that the MTD techniques provide better means to defend against IKC-based intrusion activities.

During an advanced persistent threat (APT), an attacker group usually establish more than one C&C server and these C&C servers will change their domain names and corresponding IP addresses over time to be unseen by anti-virus software or intrusion prevention systems. For this reason, discovering and catching C&C sites becomes a big challenge in information security. Based on our observations and deductions, a malware tends to contain a fixed user agent string, and the connection behaviors generated by a malware is different from that by a benign service or a normal user. This paper proposed a new method comprising filtering and clustering methods to detect C&C servers with a relatively higher coverage rate. The experiments revealed that the proposed method can successfully detect C&C Servers, and the can provide an important clue for detecting APT.

Among most of the cyber attacks that occured, the most drastic are advanced persistent threats. APTs are differ from other attacks as they have multiple phases, often silent for long period of time and launched by adamant, well-funded opponents. These targeted attacks mainly concentrated on government agencies and organizations in industries, as are those involved in international trade and having sensitive data. APTs escape from detection by antivirus solutions, intrusion detection and intrusion prevention systems and firewalls. In this paper we proposes a classification model having 99.8% accuracy, for the detection of APT.