Now, more and more factories choose to use USB removable drives to transfer files due to the limit of the network access to industrial control systems. But, this may bring threats to the systems. In this situation, the related technologies to fight against these threats should appear. See some analysis in this post.
USB Threats Industrial Facilities’ Cybersecurity
Industrial facilities’ cybersecurity is very important anywhere and anytime, and many USB drive manufactures have realized this issue.
Where Are the Threats from?
Nowadays, the pressure to limit the network access to industrial control systems is increased. In this situation, more and more plants would like to rely on the USB removable devices to transfer files, patches and updates. However, some researches show that USB threats industrial facilities’ cybersecurity, and this influence becomes more and more serious.
To some extent, a USB removable drive even becomes a main media to spread virus and malware. To be specific, a USB drive can be applied to attack the systems directly by using the USB interface as a powerful attack vector.
When considering the threats to industrial systems from USB, most of you may remind the Insustroyer strain which cut the power off to the city of Kiev in Ukraine for an hour. Yes, many operating systems, controls and equipments which are used to power the industrial facilities always are using the legacy components which were never equipped with the over-the air (OTA) updates or cybersecurity. Besides, due to the size, hardware and memory limitations, it might be unsuitable to use the direct protection.
How to Deal with These Threats
A good solution to get rid of these risks is to use strong perimeter defense. However, when a USB key is connected to the industrial system directly, the defense can be easily escaped.
To solve this issue, Honeywell has introduced the Secure Media Exchange technology which is specially used to manage USB security. This technology gives users a place to plug in and then check the drives for use.
On the on other hand, this technology let the company gather some related useful information.
The Findings
The result shows that almost 44% of the customers have detected and blocked at least one file which has a security issue. Additionally, 26% of the threats can cause big corruption to the operations. For example, the threat may let you lose control of the operation or cause data loss issue.
When these threats make you lose your important files, you can ask a free file recovery tool for help to get them back.
An exporter said that: “The data showed much more serious threats than we expected. And taken together, the results indicate that a number of these threats were targeted and intentional while many of which can lead to serious and dangerous situations at sites that handle industrial processes.”
These threats always happen to the industrial sites, like refineries, chemical plants and pulp & paper facilities all over the world. Additionally, one in six of the threats aimed to industrial control systems (ICSs) or Internet of Things (IoT) devices.
As to the found threats, 15% were high-profile, like Triton, Mirai, WannaCry, and Stuxnet. These threats are seemed far away from the industrial environment, but they may affect the industrial control facilities via the USB removable storage drives in a relatively high density.
In some comparative tests, 11% of the discovered threats couldn’t be detected by the traditional anti-virus software. This also increase the loss caused by these threats.
At the end, we should believe that the related technology will be getting more mature in the future.
About The Author
Position: Columnist
Stella has been working in MiniTool Software as an English Editor for more than 7 years. Her articles mainly cover the fields of data recovery including storage media data recovery and phone data recovery, YouTube videos download, partition management, and video conversions.