This year the report highlighted the increasingly complex threat landscape and the corresponding escalating pressure on defenders to enhance visibility into and resilience of OT/ICS networks Organizations with strong incident response capabilities, defensible architectures, secure remote access protocols, and robust network monitoring are far better positioned to reduce the risk of a successful attack on the enterprise OT even in this increasingly complex environment.

This year highlighted the increasingly complex threat landscape and the corresponding escalating pressure on defenders to enhance visibility into and resilience of OT/ICS networks. This focus on simplicity highlights a critical point for defenders: effective implementation of the SANS ICS 5 Critical Controls remains the best defense against OT targeting adversaries.

Dragos started the Year in Review to highlight significant trends in the OT cybersecurity community. This year’s report aims to go further by offering practitioners and leaders the most up-to-date data, along with perspectives from the field, to help them better defend critical infrastructure around the world. These perspectives are focused on providing actionable insights that have been tried and tested to help organizations effectively defend against and respond to industrial cyber threats.

The industrial cyber threat landscape is constantly changing with new adversaries, vulnerabilities, and attacks that put operations and safety at risk. The 6th annual Dragos Year in Review summarizes what you need to know about your threats and benchmark your OT cybersecurity posture.

Dragos is excited to present the fifth year of the annual Dragos Year In Review report on Industrial Control System (ICS)/Operational Technology (OT) cyber threats, vulnerabilities, assessments, and incident response observations. This report captures how a portion of the industrial community is performing and progressing, and highlights the areas that need improvement to provide safe, reliable operations into 2022 and beyond.

A review of the threat landscape (actors, actions, etc._ affecting industrial infrastructure in Europe.

This report - compiled from the engagements performed throughout 2019 in customer environments by our threat hunting, penetration testing, incident response, tabletop exercise, and assessments teams

This report anticipates activity targeting and affecting ICS to increase into 2020 and further. It expects to see more adversaries expand their focus to additional criticalinfrastructure and industrial environments, which willlikely align with activity associated with military orgeopolitical conflict. Although defenders continue to gaininsight through OT-specific detection and monitoringplatforms, it is imperative people continue to improvevisibility into activities and threats impacting criticalinfrastructure.

The findings in this report are a comprehensive look at ICS vulnerability statistics, including how they affect industrial control networks and whether appropriate mitigation is provided alongside the published advisories. Dragos identifies errors in the vulnerability scores associated with public reports, a critical part of our vulnerability assessments. By identifying and updating errors in vulnerability scores, Dragos vulnerability assessments help asset owners and operators better prioritize and manage patching and update procedures.

In mid-November 2017, the Dragos, Inc. team discovered ICS-tailored malware deployed against at least one victim in the Middle East. The team identifies this malware as TRISIS because it targets Schneider Electric’s Triconex safety instrumented system (SIS) enabling the replacement of logic in final control elements. TRISIS is highly targeted and likely does not pose an immediate threat to other Schneider Electric customers, let alone other SIS products. Importantly, the malware leverages no inherent vulnerability in Schneider Electric products. However, this capability, methodology, and tradecraft in this very specific event may now be replicated by other adversaries and thus represents an addition to industrial asset owner and operators’ threat models.

Dragos, Inc. was notified by the Slovak anti-virus firm ESET of an ICS tailored malware on June 8th, 2017. The Dragos team was able to use this notification to find samples of the malware, identify new functionality and impact scenarios, and confirm that this was the malware employed in the December 17th, 2016 cyber-attack on the Kiev, Ukraine transmission substation which resulted in electric grid operations impact. This report serves as an industry report to inform the electric sector and security community of the potential implications of this malware and the appropriate details to have a nuanced discussion.

There is a considerable amount of market confusion around the types of threat detection, how they are derived, and the uses for each. The purpose of this paper is to address those challenges by identifying the four types of threat detection and offering sample use-cases focused on industrial control system (ICS) and industrial internet of things (IIoT) environments.