Daan Keuper

ICS: Industrial or Insecure Control Systems?

ICS, or Industrial Control Systems, are systems that are involved with running an industrial process and are thus used in OT environments. Examples are SCADA systems or PLC’s operating in a factory or power plant. They are an interesting field for security research, as a successful attack could have devastating results. Luckily the number of successful attacks that truly targeted ICS environments are scarce. At the same time this industry faces some difficult challenges, such as high availability requirements, old technology and a low security maturity.

In this session Daan Keuper and Thijs Alkemade, security researchers at Computest, would like to talk about some of the vulnerabilities they found during their research. With these vulnerabilities they were able to win last years Pwn2Own Miami competition, a competition were researchers are challenged to find zero-day vulnerabilities in ICS systems. Secondly they will discuss some of the challenges that this industry faces, which adversaries actually target OT environments and how these environments can be better protected.