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Dead Man's PLC: Towards Viable Cyber Extortion for Operational Technology

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Article number23
<mark>Journal publication date</mark>1/10/2024
<mark>Journal</mark>Digital Threats: Research and Practice
Issue number3
Volume5
Number of pages24
Pages (from-to)1-24
Publication StatusPublished
Early online date20/06/24
<mark>Original language</mark>English

Abstract

For decades, operational technology (OT) has enjoyed the luxury of being suitably inaccessible, and thus has experienced directly targeted cyber attacks from only the most advanced and well-resourced adversaries. However, security via obscurity cannot last forever, and indeed a shift is happening whereby less advanced adversaries are showing an appetite for targeting OT. With this shift in adversary demographics, there will likely also be a shift in attack goals, from clandestine process degradation and espionage to overt cyber extortion (Cy-X). Even if encryption-based Cy-X techniques were launched against OT assets, typical recovery practices designed for engineering processes would provide adequate resilience. In response, this paper introduces Dead Man's PLC (DM-PLC), a pragmatic step towards viable OT Cy-X that acknowledges and weaponises the resilience processes typically encountered in any OT environment. Using only existing functionality, DM-PLC considers an entire environment as the entity under ransom, whereby all assets constantly send one another heartbeats to ensure the attack remains untampered with, treating any deviations as a detonation trigger akin to a Dead Man's switch. A proof of concept of DM-PLC is implemented and evaluated on a peer reviewed and industry validated OT testbed to demonstrate its malicious potential.