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Alarm bells ringing again –a new malware threats industrial networks. After the attack suffered in Ukraine with BlackEnergy and the failures occurred at the beginning of the year, other new malware is added to the list of attackers of industrial control systems started by Stuxnet

Carrying out an intrusion test or vulnerability analysis in a control system can prove complex due to availability. This is where testbeds come into play. They reproduce production environments and can be of great assistance to researchers and security analysts

Virtualization is a technology that sooner or later will settle in the control systems, as was the case with corporate systems. The moment the impact that it may cause on the process is minimum and a proper security level may be guaranteed, it will be time to implement the virtualization of control systems.

Credentials can be described as the basic information required to access any device. Sharing and using privileged credentials within control systems is a common task that must be controlled to minimise potential exposure or leakage of information.

The installation of security tools may be complex sometimes due to different reasons: the complexity of the tool itself, the environment in which it is installed, the necessary settings, etc. This post shows how to implement an IDS solution and how to manage events in a centralised manner by means of an event manager for industrial control systems.

Smart buildings, either intended for housing, for offices or for industries, are fitted with communications systems for control of all elements such as lighting, heating and air conditioning, blinds, etc. Such communications are mainly carried out by means of two protocols or technologies: BACnet and LonWorks. In this article, the security capabilities of each protocol for operating in as a secure manner as possible shall be described.

Companies usually spend a large share of their budgets to improve the security of their systems assuming that attacks comes from outside of their networks. But, what if the attack comes from within?

Last year ransomware became the threat most widely used by attackers to monetise their actions. This fact has also affected industrial sectors which, to a greater or lesser extent, have suffered this type of malware.

As explained in the first post of this series dedicated to the C4V model, the cyber security level of outsourced services is key to assess the cyber security capabilities of any organisation: It is no use increasing the cyber security levels of an organisation if their suppliers’ levels are not as high, because -it goes without saying that- "security is as strong as its weakest link".