State of the Union for SCADA HMI Vulnerabilities

Architecture and Background

Over the last year, synchronized and coordinated attacks against critical infrastructure have taken center stage. Remote cyber intrusions at three Ukrainian regional electric power distribution companies in December 2015 left approximately 225,000 customers without power. Malware, like BlackEnergy, is being specially developed to target supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) systems. Specifically, adversaries are focusing their efforts on obtaining access to the human-machine interface (HMI) solutions that act as the main hub for managing the operation of the control system.

Vulnerability Analysis

Vulnerabilities in these SCADA HMI solutions are, and will continue to be, highly valuable as we usher in this new era of software exploitation. This talk covers an in-depth analysis performed on a corpus of 200+ confirmed SCADA HMI vulnerabilities. It details out the popular vulnerability types discovered in HMI solutions developed by the biggest SCADA vendors, including Schneider Electric, Siemens, General Electric, and Advantech. It studies the weaknesses in the technologies used to develop HMI solutions and describes how critical vulnerabilities manifest in the underlying code.

Exploitation and Demonstrations

The talk will compare the time-to-patch performance of various SCADA vendors along with a comparison of the SCADA industry to the rest of the software industry. Finally, using the data presented, additional guidance will be provided to SCADA researchers along with a prediction on what we expect next in attacks that leverage SCADA HMI vulnerabilities. Brian Gorenc is the senior manager of Vulnerability Research with Trend Micro. In this role, Gorenc leads the Zero Day Initiative (ZDI) program, which represents the world’s largest vendor-agnostic bug bounty program.

Remediation and Defensive Strategies

His focus includes analyzing and performing root-cause analysis on hundreds of zero-day vulnerabilities submitted by ZDI researchers from around the world. The ZDI works to expose and remediate weaknesses in the world’s most popular software. Brian is also responsible for organizing the ever-popular Pwn2Own hacking competitions. Fritz Sands is a security researcher with Trend Micro’s Zero Day Initiative. In this role, he analyzes and performs root-cause analysis on vulnerabilities submitted to the ZDI program, which is the world’s largest vendor-agnostic bug bounty program. Fritz also focuses on writing tools to perform static and dynamic analysis for discovering vulnerabilities. Prior to joining the ZDI in 2014, Sands was in Microsoft’s Trustworthy Computing and Secure Windows Initiative operations where he audited Windows code and developed dynamic analysis tools, and before that he was a system developer for multiple iterations of Microsoft Windows.