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You're reading from  Network Scanning Cookbook

Product typeBook
Published inSep 2018
PublisherPackt
ISBN-139781789346480
Edition1st Edition
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Author (1)
Sairam Jetty
Sairam Jetty
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Sairam Jetty

Sairam Jetty has more than 5 years of hands-on experience in many verticals of penetration testing, compliance, digital forensics, and malware research. He is currently working with Paladion Networks, Abu Dhabi, as a senior analyst and team lead. He has assisted and associated with various financial, telecom, and industrial institutions for testing and securing their applications and environments. Sairam has industry-standard certifications, such as OSCP, Digital Forensic Analyst, Digital Forensic Investigator, and Mobile Security Expert. He also specializes in source code review and mobile application security. He has acquired a great knowledge of SCADA/ICS and nuclear security from his corporate experience and self-learning.
Read more about Sairam Jetty

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Network Scanning for IoT, SCADA/ICS

In this chapter, we will cover the following recipes:

  • Introduction to SCADA/ICS
  • Using Nmap to scan SCADA/ICS
  • Using Nessus to scan SCADA/ICS systems

Introduction to SCADA/ICS

The automation technology used to manage and perform various industrial operations such as line management control and operations control are part of what is known as operational technology:

Industrial control systems (ICS) cover a huge part of the operational technology segment, and are used to monitor and control various operations such as automating production, the control and monitoring of hardware systems, regulating temperature by controlling water levels, and the flow at a nuclear facility. Most ICS usage is done in very critical systems that are required to be available all the time.

The hardware that is used for ICS is of two types, programmable logic controllers (PLCs), or discrete process control systems (DPC), which are in turn managed by Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) systems. SCADA allows and makes easy the management...

Using Nmap to scan SCADA/ICS

Nmap provides multiple scripts, and its function also allows users to create multiple custom scripts to identify the SCADA systems that are present in a network. This allows an analyst to create specific test cases to test the SCADA systems. Some of the scripts that are available by default in the latest Nmap Script library are as follows:

  • s7-info.nse: This is used to enumerate Siemens S7 PLC devices and collect information such as system name, version, module, and type. This script works similarly to that of the PLCScan utility.
  • modbus-discover.nse: Enumerates SCADA Modbus slave ids (sids) and collects information such as sid number and slave ID data. Modbus is a protocol used by various PLC and SCADA systems.

We will see the syntax and the usage of these scripts in the following recipes.

...

Using Nessus to scan SCADA/ICS systems

Nessus has a family of plugins about 308 pages of them – that can be used to perform scans on SCADA/ICS devices. You can browse the family of plugins here: https://www.tenable.com/plugins/nessus/families/SCADA . These plugins are checked against the given device to identify any vulnerability that has been identified based on the signatures present in the plugin.

Getting ready

In order to complete this activity, you will have to satisfy the following prerequisites on your machine:

  1. You must have Nessus installed.
  2. You must have network access to the hosts on which the scans are to be performed.

In order to install Nessus, you can follow the instructions provided in Chapter...

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Network Scanning Cookbook
Published in: Sep 2018Publisher: PacktISBN-13: 9781789346480
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Author (1)

author image
Sairam Jetty

Sairam Jetty has more than 5 years of hands-on experience in many verticals of penetration testing, compliance, digital forensics, and malware research. He is currently working with Paladion Networks, Abu Dhabi, as a senior analyst and team lead. He has assisted and associated with various financial, telecom, and industrial institutions for testing and securing their applications and environments. Sairam has industry-standard certifications, such as OSCP, Digital Forensic Analyst, Digital Forensic Investigator, and Mobile Security Expert. He also specializes in source code review and mobile application security. He has acquired a great knowledge of SCADA/ICS and nuclear security from his corporate experience and self-learning.
Read more about Sairam Jetty