Biblio

Modern cybercrimes have exponentially grown over the last one decade. Ransomware is one of the types of malware which is the result of sophisticated attempt to compromise the modern computer systems. The governments and large corporations are investing heavily to combat this cyber threat against their critical infrastructure. It has been observed that over the last few years that Industrial Control Systems (ICS) have become the main target of Ransomware due to the sensitive operations involved in the day to day processes of these industries. As the technology is evolving, more and more traditional industrial systems are replaced with advanced industry methods involving advanced technologies such as Internet of Things (IoT). These technology shift help improve business productivity and keep the company's global competitive in an overflowing competitive market. However, the systems involved need secure measures to protect integrity and availability which will help avoid any malfunctioning to their operations due to the cyber-attacks. There have been several cyber-attack incidents on healthcare, pharmaceutical, water cleaning and energy sector. These ICS' s are operated by remote control facilities and variety of other devices such as programmable logic controllers (PLC) and sensors to make a network. Cyber criminals are exploring vulnerabilities in the design of these ICS's to take the command and control of these systems and disrupt daily operations until ransomware is paid. This paper will provide critical analysis of the impact of Ransomware threat on SCADA systems.

Industrial Internet-of-Things has been touted as the next revolution in the industrial domain, offering interconnectivity, independence, real-time operation, and self-optimization. Integration of smart systems, however, bridges the gap between information and operation technology, creating new avenues for attacks from the cyber domain. The dismantling of this air-gap, in conjunction with the devices' long lifespan -in the range of 20-30 years-, motivates us to bring the attention of the community to emerging advanced persistent threats. We demonstrate a threat that bridges the air-gap by leaking data from memory to analog peripherals through Direct Memory Access (DMA), delivered as a firmware modification through the supply chain. The attack automatically adapts to a target device by leveraging the Device Tree and resides solely in the peripherals, completely transparent to the main CPU, by judiciously short-circuiting specific components. We implement this attack on a commercial Programmable Logic Controller, leaking information over the available LEDs. We evaluate the presented attack vector in terms of stealthiness, and demonstrate no observable overhead on both CPU performance and DMA transfer speed. Since traditional anomaly detection techniques would fail to detect this firmware trojan, this work highlights the need for industrial control system-appropriate techniques that can be applied promptly to installed devices.