Cyber Threats to Industrial Control Systems

Cyber attacks have been a crucial problem on the Internet for more than a couple of decades. As information and communication technologies have been applied to the field systems in the traditional industries, they also have become connected and more vulnerable to the existing cyber attack techniques. To make matters worse, a practical malicious software suite was exposed from Italian hacking team by another leakage incident, which is noted by somebody as an insider's rip. Now, we worry about social problems caused by copycats. Nevertheless, more concerns have been arisen among experts about that this tendency is getting more serious when IoT (Internet of Things) environment has been realized. In an IoT environment, every device will be massively connected to each other. We can classify the IoT devices roughly into two categories, which are leaf devices and gateways. In this environment, anonymous devices may usually participate as a authorized consumer or producer for a service in the same domain with a gateway. The gateway may take a role for some devices as a delegate for specific services. Insider's exposure problem will be more serious concern in this situation. At a user's point of view, smart-phones for wearable devices, the AVN (Audio Visual Navigation) on smart cars and HMI host for ICS (Industrial Control Systems) are considered as gateways for IoT environments. In this situation, a canonical form of large scale IoT devices should be smart cars. The smart cars are going to include more software-incorporated electric components for intelligent safety functions adopted at the vacancy of the combustion engine and are also becoming connected and remotely controllable. This means these mobile devices cannot be free from the cyber security threats, which is solicited by insider devices [Stephen:CEA]. For a recent example, commercial networked vehicles were remotely hacked and controlled without any wired connections. In this panel, we will discuss current hot issues related to the malicious software in various aspects. In the existing mobile network and the connected smart devices, Android-based mobile malware is a big trouble. Combined malware is another problem among the emerging all-connected ICS equipment. Detecting these malicious behavior is one of the new IT challenges. We will share perspective ideas related to these topics among panelists and audiences through a professional discussion.