The security issue of ICS: The use of IT infrastructure

Abstract

With the trend of Industry 4.0, the communication established by Ethernet is becoming more and more common in the Industrial Control System (ICS), and it brings not only pros but also cons like vulnerabilities from information technology. Furthermore, most devices in the ICS are not ready for cyberattacks, and it opens up opportunities for attackers. We generalized a procedure of attacking an Ethernet-enabled ICS and implemented it to the real industrial system we obtained. The procedure gets the information and access of the devices in the ICS, like identifying the manufacturer of Programmable Logic Controllers (PLCs) and overwriting the configuration of PLCs.