High-profile security incidents in the past decade have brought increased scrutiny to cyber security for operational technology (OT). However, there is a continued perception across critical infrastructure organizations that OT networks are isolated from public networks—such as the Internet. In Mandiant’s experience, the concept of an ‘air gap’ separating OT assets from external networks rarely holds true in practice.
In 2018, we released a blog post presenting the tools and techniques that TEMP.Veles used during the TRITON incident to traverse from an external compromise of the information technology (IT) network of a critical infrastructure organization to the safety systems located deep in the OT network. We regularly reproduce this approach in our OT-focused red team engagements to expose similar attack paths across client infrastructure and to identify environment specific opportunities to prevent and detect network propagation techniques across intermediary systems.
In this blog post, we share another case study from one of our OT Red Team engagements to illustrate the tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) that can be leveraged by sophisticated threat actors to breach the protected perimeter between an IT network and an OT network. We also examine some of the different types of critical information often found in IT networks that an attacker can leverage during later stages of the Targeted Attack Lifecycle. The goal of this engagement was to access an endpoint meter control infrastructure for a state-wide smart grid environment from the Internet and turn it off.
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Source: FireEye