The Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) has experienced considerable growth in recent years, providing crucial improvements. However, it also has some limitations in terms of consumption, security, cost or scalability. In this blog, we will see how the appearance of LoRaWAN in this area can solve part of those limitations.
A high percentage of devices developed for the industrial world have physical interfaces that allow secondary communications to be established. These communications allow the execution of important tasks such as the management of the devices themselves or changing the way they interact with industrial processes. Although in most cases it is necessary to have physical access to the device in order to use these interfaces, manipulation of the device through these interfaces allows attackers to manipulate the operation of the system without leaving any trace if there are no mechanisms to protect the asset from hardware hacking.
This article aims to show the most widespread physical interfaces in industrial devices and embedded systems in general. On the other hand, we want to show some attacks executed throughout history in the industrial world. These attacks, thanks to the physical manipulation of a device, have allowed attackers to achieve a great impact on the targeted industrial process
A growing number of industrial companies are adopting vulnerability management on their devices and systems, in order to perform this management in a correct and efficient way, the first step is to create an asset inventory or update it. Some companies are looking for vulnerability management services to stay on top of the latest cybersecurity issues affecting their assets. In addition, we are also noticing an increase in the availability of tools and their implementation for vulnerability management.
With the industrial revolution of Industry 4.0, industrial processes have become more intelligent, and this has led to the deployment of a greater number of devices.
All these deployments usually have a common point, being the gateways, which, after being deployed, are responsible for the translation of some protocols to the TCP/UDP frame or simply send the information to the cloud.
Being a point that gathers a large amount of data and capable of providing intelligence to industrial processes, industrial gateways have become a very desirable target for attackers.
Currently, there is a constant evolution in the technologies and implementations made in Industrial Control Systems. On one hand, some of the most common implementations for the improvement of industrial systems infrastructures are digitalization and the use of cloud technology. On the other hand, the increase in communication protocols and IIoT devices (due to the growth of the Industry 4.0) generates a large volume of traffic that is difficult to control and secure.
Within the industrial world, there are some sectors such as robotics, which has evolver considerably. This has led to the need to update all the regulations and standards, both in terms of physical (safety) and cybersecurity. (security). Given that the robotics sector is and will increasingly become a highly technical sector with exponential growth, the need to update all documentation has been promoted by a large group of companies in the sector, which, above all, have focused their concerns on the cybersecurity of the industrial robotics world.
The proliferation of cybersecurity incidents in industrial environments has given rise to a huge concern in the various existing sectors. Some of them, such us the energy sector, are choosing the path taking in the banking sector with the TIBER-EU framework. In addition, many governments are allocating large sums of money to their government agencies to develop strategic plans in which that exercises are included
The programming of PLCs is a fundamental part of the initial phases when building and designing industrial plants. About that environment, the company will base all its operations in that environment making the configuration of these controllers a critical element. When it comes to programming these devices there are a series of steps and best practices that take advantage of the native functionalities available and that involve little or no need to resort to a PLC programmer, protecting the device in a simple way with minimum spend on resource.
After the establishment of the cloud technology in industrial environments to provide processes a greater intelligence, new technological challenges arise that give rise to technical implementation solutions such as edge computing. This strategy makes it possible to extend cloud environments to different locations for processing collected data from the environment locally and immediately. An example of this new technological paradigm can be seen in modern manufacturing plants where sensors (IIoT) generate a constant flow of data to prevent breakdowns, improve operations, etc. Given that amount of data that can be generated, it is faster and more profitable to process the data in a close position from the equipment rather than transmitting It to a remote data center.
Es tanta la información que se encuentra actualmente accesible para los usuarios en Internet, que aquella ofrecida por ciertas páginas web o aplicaciones en tiempo real puede resultar de especial preocupación en cuanto a su confidencialidad para ciertos sectores, dado que podría ser utilizada con fines malintencionados.