“Open” Access to Industrial Systems Interface is Also Far From Zero, (Fri, May 14th)

Jan&#;x26;#;39;s last diary about the recent attack against the US pipeline[1] was in perfect timing with the quick research I was preparing for a few weeks. If core components of industrial systems are less exposed in the wild, as said Jan, there is another issue with such infrastructures: remote access tools. Today, buildings, factories, farms must be controlled remotely or sometimes managed by third parties. If Microsoft RDP is common on many networks (and is often the weakest link in a classic attack like ransomware), there is another protocol that is heavily used to remote control industrial systems: VNC (“Virtual Network Computing”)[2]. This protocol works with many different operating systems (clients and servers), is simple and efficient. For many companies developing industrial systems, It is a good candidate to offer remote access.

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Number of industrial control systems on the internet is lower then in 2020…but still far from zero, (Wed, May 12th)

With the recent ransomware attack that impacted operation of one of the major US pipelines[1], I thought it might be a good time to revisit the old topic of internet-connected industrial systems. Since operational technologies are generally used to support/control processes that directly impact the physical world, the danger of successful attacks on them should be self-evident, as should the need to protect them.

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Correctly Validating IP Addresses: Why encoding matters for input validation., (Mon, May 10th)

Recently, a number of libraries suffered from a very similar security flaw: IP addresses expressed in octal were not correctly interpreted. The result was that an attacker was able to bypass input validation rules that restricted IP addresses to specific subnets.

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Who is Probing the Internet for Research Purposes?, (Sat, May 8th)

Shodan&#;x26;#;x5b;1&#;x26;#;x5d; is one of the most familiar site for research on what is on the internet. In Oct 2020 I did a diary on Censys &#;x26;#;x5b;2&#;x26;#;x5d;&#;x26;#;x5b;3&#;x26;#;x5d;, another site collecting similar information like Shodan. The next two sites are regularly scanning the internet for data which isn&#;x26;#;39;t shared with the security community at large.

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