Why ICS environments are easy targets for attackers
Let's quickly discuss why ICS make such an easy target. This is relevant because it portrays some of the methodologies and angles used in pentesting these environments. To summarize, ICSes are considered easy targets for the following reasons:
- By design, an ICS is meant to be open in nature, easily accessible to the people working with them, and leave little in the way of barriers for systems to interconnect. This open nature often introduces common weaknesses in the system such as the following:
- Default or easily guessable passwords (if there are passwords defined at all)
- Default system configurations that allow us to easily connect to/share/access resources
- User and process privileges that allow too much system access
- Lacking or missing security controls
Additionally, because security was not a design consideration for ICS or its components, security controls such as encryption, authentication, authorization, and...
