Segmentados Administración sistemas y redes TI

Perhaps, given the many important cybersecurity leaks and intrusions in recent years involving everything from social media accounts to critical infrastructure and classified military secrets, the attention paid to the Aurora vulnerability has not been proportional to its seriousness and systems affected. This is because it affects almost every electrical system in the world, and potentially any rotating equipment, whether it generates energy or is essential for an industrial or commercial installation. If the threat is so widespread, why isn’t the industry more worried and actively looking for solutions? From this article various possible reasons for this are given.

The main security standards and best practice guidelines in industrial cybersecurity include as a requirement the need for a user authentication system. The options involve implementations in each device of this system or being integrated into a centralised user authentication system. One of the most-used options is the use of the LDAP protocol, but there are a number of points to consider in the design phase, which are key when implementing a specific centralised user management system for industrial control systems, under LDAP.

Control system networks have grown immensely in recent years, something similar to what happened with the explosion of IT networks in the 1980s. This growth is happening somewhat chaotically, promoted mainly by productive needs and by the lack of joint definition of network administration managers for IT and OT, instead of doing it by thinking of the future, scalability and security.

Security breaches that put our privacy at risk, leaks of our data, passwords... are incidents that happen more and more often. Protecting ourselves from these information leaks is often beyond our reach, but this does not mean that we should not try to take measures to protect our data. DNS-over-TLS can be very helpful in encrypting our communications, making them much more secure.

Over recent years we have witnessed how industrial controls systems are not exempt from being targeted for cyberattacks. In this article we look back at threats detected in recent years to see how we can defend ourselves against them.

Given that availability is always a critical point to take into account for within industrial environments, it is necessary to prevent the attacks that denial of services cause and that affect these environments. The means of giving way to a denial of service can be diverse, much like the means of mitigating these problems. This article will review all of these points, as well as the way in which the risks derived from these attacks can be reduced.

Advances in security within control systems have brought us many of the security tools and services offered in IT for this environment. Until now, protection was based on reactive measures, acting only where there was evidence of the attack, but this trend changed with deployment of monitoring and the proactive defensive actions that this can provide.

The defence in depth and, especially, the definition of Zones and Conduits is a subject considered by many experts as a "theoretical" matter. However, with the help of this article, the user will understand its applicability by explaining the keys to approach the creation of Zones and Conduits, as well as the elements that come into play.

Honeypots and their implementation in a network, known as a honeynet, are a powerful tool for defending your system and safely monitoring the attacks carried out against it. In this article we will detail what honeypots are, their implementation in OT environments, the advantages and disadvantages of their implementation in the system and the latest honeypots developed for industrial control systems.

Not only is the interpretation of network traffic crucial to analyse the safety and performance of a network structure, but also for other tasks, such as incident management, the optimisation of our network infrastructure or for didactic purposes. In order to do so, it is necessary to have dissectors that help separate each of the fields that make up a protocol, and allow them to be individually analysed.

From the point of view of cybersecurity, access to automation and industrial control systems is one of the most critical control points and that's why special care must be taken when it comes to applying access security and fortification policies. On occasions, it is necessary to carry out remote tasks such as, for example, maintenance, upgrading or device or application management work. Thus, external personnel outside our company may perform said tasks, including manufacturers, wholesalers or providers of services, making it necessary to protect these accesses from potential threats.

In recent years, indicators of compromise have become the best way of exchanging information when it comes to managing an incident. But, do we really know how to manage an indicator of compromise? The aim of an indicator of compromise is to map the information that is received or extracted during the analysis of an incident. This is done in such a way that it can be reused by other investigators or affected people, in order to discover the same evidence in their systems and to be able to determine if they have been compromised or not.