Extending the cyber-attack landscape for SCADA-based critical infrastructure

In this paper, we collated existing known attacks, identified and combined the existing range of attack landscapes, expanded and “filled the gaps” in the landscape, thus presenting a complete cyber-attack framework that perceives attacks against entire SCADA-based critical infrastructure. Our framework identifies four attack types, traditional IT-based attacks, protocol specific attacks, configuration-based attacks and control process attacks, allowing us to describe practical attacks. The benefit of recognizing the range of attacks on entire critical systems is that it allows us to defend against attacks with far greater efficiency and intelligence. To support the validity of our presented framework, we present a case study demonstrating a series of attacks on physical Distributed Network Protocol 3 (DNP3) critical infrastructure equipment.