industrial control system | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

Cybersecurity researchers have discovered critical vulnerabilities in industrial VPN implementations primarily used to provide remote access to operational technology (OT) networks that could allow hackers to overwrite data, execute malicious code, and compromise industrial control systems (ICS). A new report published by industrial cybersecurity company Claroty demonstrates multiple severe vulnerabilities in enterprise-grade VPN installations, including Secomea GateManager M2M Server, Moxa EDR-G902, and EDR-G903, and HMS Networks eWon's eCatcher VPN client. These vulnerable products are widely used in field-based industries such as oil and gas, water utilities, and electric utilities to remotely access, maintain and monitor ICS and field devices, including programmable logic controllers (PLCs) and input/output devices. According to Claroty researchers, successful exploitation of these vulnerabilities can give an unauthenticated attacker direct access to the ICS devices an

Cybersecurity firm FireEye claims to have discovered evidence that proves the involvement of a Russian-owned research institute in the development of the TRITON malware that caused some industrial systems to unexpectedly shut down last year, including a petrochemical plant in Saudi Arabia. TRITON , also known as Trisis, is a piece of ICS malware designed to target the Triconex Safety Instrumented System (SIS) controllers made by Schneider Electric which are often used in oil and gas facilities. Triconex Safety Instrumented System is an autonomous control system that independently monitors the performance of critical systems and takes immediate actions automatically if a dangerous state is detected. Since malware of such capabilities can't be created by a computer hacker without possessing necessary knowledge of Industrial Control Systems (ICS), researchers believe with "high confidence" that Moscow-based lab Central Scientific Research Institute of Chemistry and

For years, securing a company's systems was synonymous with securing its "perimeter." There was what was safe "inside" and the unsafe outside world. We built sturdy firewalls and deployed sophisticated detection systems, confident that keeping the barbarians outside the walls kept our data and systems safe. The problem is that we no longer operate within the confines of physical on-prem installations and controlled networks. Data and applications now reside in distributed cloud environments and data centers, accessed by users and devices connecting from anywhere on the planet. The walls have crumbled, and the perimeter has dissolved, opening the door to a new battlefield: identity . Identity is at the center of what the industry has praised as the new gold standard of enterprise security: "zero trust." In this paradigm, explicit trust becomes mandatory for any interactions between systems, and no implicit trust shall subsist. Every access request, regardless of its origin,

Last December, a cyber attack on Ukrainian Electric power grid caused the power outage in the northern part of Kiev — the country's capital — and surrounding areas, causing a blackout for tens of thousands of citizens for an hour and fifteen minutes around midnight. Now, security researchers have discovered the culprit behind those cyber attacks on the Ukrainian industrial control systems. Slovakia-based security software maker ESET and US critical infrastructure security firm Dragos Inc. say they have discovered a new dangerous piece of malware in the wild that targets critical industrial control systems and is capable of causing blackouts. Dubbed " Industroyer " or " CrashOverRide ," the grid-sabotaging malware was likely to be used in the December 2016 cyber attack against Ukrainian electric utility Ukrenergo , which the security firms say represents a dangerous advancement in critical infrastructure hacking. According to the researchers, CrashO

Russian cyber security and antivirus vendor Kaspersky Lab has made available the much awaited KasperskyOS , a secure-by-design operating system based on Microkernel architecture which is specially designed for network devices, industrial control systems and the Internet of Things. The operating system is not made for your average home PC; instead, it is meant to protect industrial systems and embedded devices from cyber attacks by preventing any third-party or malicious code from executing. Kaspersky Lab CEO Eugene Kaspersky confirmed the rumors of a new operating system on his official blog published on Monday, saying this project under the codename 11-11 has been in the works for 14 years and has been designed from scratch. The reason behind developing KasperskyOS is simple: Growing Internet-of-Things and embedded devices in industrial control systems (ICS) to power critical infrastructure. It's quite easy for most companies to get rid of the virus-infected computer,

Stuxnet is a sophisticated virus specifically designed to attack supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) systems manufactured by Siemens, a German industrial giant. These systems are commonly used to manage water supplies, power plants, and other industrial facilities, making the worm particularly dangerous for governments. Who Wrote This Program? Experts in cybersecurity speculate that Stuxnet may have been created by a government or a well-financed group of investors. The virus is too complex to be the work of a single hacker. Given that much of the damage occurred in Iran, many believe Stuxnet was designed to sabotage the country's nuclear facilities. Cyber-Attacks Getting More Sophisticated Even if Stuxnet wasn't targeting U.S. infrastructure, its creation marks a new wave of cyberattacks. These attacks, including viruses and malware, aim at infrastructure such as power-generating facilities. This shift means we must now worry about more sophisticated threats, not