Pentesting industrial environments requires caution

So far in this book, we have discussed the potential risk to the ICS environment by performing many active security monitoring activities. Penetration testing is the ultimate active scanning and interrogation activity you can perform on the ICS environment. The assessment has us scanning, probing, poking, fuzzing, attacking, exploiting, and stressing the systems and devices that we agreed on before and are sensitive to this kind of abuse as it is.

As such, we should take extra care when performing the pentest activities on an ICS environment. At a minimum, the production process should be completely stopped, and the right people who can help recover systems and devices when things go wrong should be involved. But more ideally, we should create an approximation of the ICS environment to perform the pentest activities on, or leverage the test environment an organization has, if you are lucky enough to engage a customer with the...