Inadequate Boundary Protections Common in Critical Infrastructure: ICS-CERT

The assessments conducted by the U.S. Industrial Control Systems Cyber Emergency Response Team (ICS-CERT) in 2016 showed that inadequate boundary protection has remained the most prevalent weakness in critical infrastructure organizations.

ICS-CERT conducted 130 assessments in the fiscal year 2016, which is more than in any previous year. Monitor newsletters published by ICS-CERT this year show that it has already conducted 74 assessments in the first half of 2017.

Assessments are offered to both government organizations and private sector companies whose owners and operators request them. Last year, the CERT conducted assessments in 12 of the 16 critical infrastructure sectors, including chemical, commercial facilities, communications, critical manufacturing, emergency services, dams, energy, food and agriculture, IT, government facilities, transportation, and water and wastewater systems.

Similar to the previous two years, inadequate boundary protection remained the most common flaw – 94 discoveries representing more than 13 percent of all weaknesses identified during assessments. Boundary protection issues can result in failure to detect unauthorized activity in critical systems, and an increased risk to control systems due to the lack of proper separation from the enterprise network.

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The second most prevalent type of vulnerability, with 42 discoveries, is “least functionality.” This refers to organizations failing to implement controls to ensure that unnecessary services, ports, protocols or applications that can be exploited to gain access to ICS are disabled.

ICS-CERT also discovered 36 instances of identification and authentication flaws. Many organizations fail to implement proper identification and authentication mechanisms for their users – this leads to accountability problems and makes it more difficult to secure the accounts of individuals who have left the company.

The fourth most prevalent issue discovered during assessments is related to physical access controls – which can make it easier for malicious actors to gain an initial foothold into the targeted organization’s ICS network.

Another common problem identified by investigators was related to mechanisms for auditing and accountability. According to ICS-CERT, 26 organizations did not have a formal process in place for reviewing and validating logs, which makes it more difficult to detect an intrusion in the ICS network and respond to an incident.

ICS-CERT’s FY 2016 Annual Assessment Report also includes recommendations on how to address these issues.

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