Industrial control systems (ICS) have the unfortunate distinction of being difficult to secure, and also being juicy targets for nation state hackers. Their combination of aging hardware and software and justified extreme risk aversion makes it difficult to update, difficult to monitor, and difficult to protect ICS against sophisticated hackers.
The vulnerability of ICS became all the more salient on March 15 when US-CERT issued a significant alert about Russian government cyber activity targeting energy and other critical infrastructure sectors that rely heavily on ICS.
ExtraHop Reveal(x) allows Industrial Control Systems (ICS) customers to achieve the level of awareness needed to detect malicious behavior via agentless, real-time traffic analysis, asset/service discovery, and native Modbus TCP/IP fluency. Regardless of the type of ICS platform, if it communicates on an IP network, its traffic and connectivity can be monitored and anomalous behavior automatically surfaced.
Out of the box, Reveal(x) is able to reveal the specific actions on objectives described in this alert. Some examples:
Identifying and browsing file servers within the victim's network. Identifying file servers can be achieved in numerous ways, including port scans and DNS reverse lookups, both of which are detectable with real-time network traffic analysis. Thanks to native CIFS/NFS/iSCSI fluency, Reveal(x) can also detect the threat actors' anomalous browsing of files.
Privileged credentials used to access domain controllers via RDP. This type of lateral movement is inherently surfaced by monitoring the network behavior of critical assets like domain controllers. Native Kerberos, LDAP, and RDP protocol support readily reveals the use of privileged account use and anomalous RDP connections.
Usage of the PsExec tool to execute commands across the network Reveal(x) can readily detect PsExec and surface the precise commands being executed via the PsExec Detection Bundle.


Ingress/egress traffic to prohibited geolocations