ICS Advisory Report
A vulnerability review for 2019/2020. This document was performed as a summary piece highlighting the last two years of ICS advisories in an in-depth way.
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Verve Industrial’s mission is to help industrial clients ensure the security and reliability of their most critical assets: their industrial control systems. Verve brings over 25 years of ICS/OT controls experience to help clients achieve rapid and lasting improvement in their Operational Technology (OT) security.
Our foundation in industrial controls engineering is core to our mission to help operators protect these critical assets that keep modern civilization operating effectively. We act as a true partner to our clients in their security and reliability journey. We walk alongside our clients to help them increase the maturity of their systems and processes over time.
One of the key challenges our clients face is the flood of new vulnerabilities released each year for ICS. They are often overwhelmed by the scale of these emerging risks. Our goal with this analysis is to bring some clarity to the task at hand, some visibility into the types of threats, and some recommendations about what actions an organization can take to address these risks.
2021 was a difficult year for everyone – political tensions were high in the East, the COVID-19 pandemic was in full swing, and with everyone homebound, the number of attacks increased considerably on both OT and traditional IT sectors.
During that tumultuous year, and with time on their hands, threat actors pounced on the opportunity to make money as they realized a high number of laptops were deployed outside regular working environments (with people using work laptops for personal activities at home), lower security in a lot of sites, and financial difficulties for a lot of employees (which leads to internal threats).
To provide more information on the threat landscape for ICS, Verve’s research team looked at updating the analytical comparison completed last year regarding the trend of ICS advisories and CVEs. To get a better view of growing risks and vulnerabilities, Verve analyzed publicly available data points and reviewed our own vulnerability analysis data from the past couple of years. We:
Vulnerabilities do not provide a comprehensive threat landscape but allow companies to feed their own risk analysis or an initial risk assessment.
In 2021, ICS-CERT issued 354 cyber security advisories available for public consumption on CISA’s website (Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency). Verve analyzed these advisories without any discrimination – no advisory was rejected based on geography, size of the company, domain of operations, vendor, etc. The only advisories that were not included in the analysis were those related to medical devices (ICSMA). This report summarizes the conclusions, the observed trends, as well as a perspective on what 2022 might hold.
--------- ICS-CERT released 354 ICS-related advisories spanning 82 vendors/OEMs, 1,198 CVEs containing references to different products, and a matrix of affected versions. ---------
ICS-CERT advisories increased by ~30% since 2020 with the number of CVEs growing by ~41%. This compares to growth of ~23% advisories and ~32% CVEs in 2020 over 2019 in these same categories. These advisories have been split between OEM application software (51%), embedded device vulnerabilities (39%) or embedded software vulnerabilities (10%).
--------- The OEMs/companies most affected by the ICS advisories have remained consistent since 2020, with Siemens being the OEM with the highest number of advisories to its name. ---------
Many of the risks created by those vulnerabilities are considered High or Critical by NIST’s National Vulnerability Database (NVD), with a doubling of those scored with a CVSS of 8/10 or higher since 2020.
These High and Critical vulnerabilities are generally fairly easy to exploit (67% are exploitable remotely and 75% have a low attack complexity), and with networks becoming more and more connected, the risk of lateral movement and privilege escalation is more important than ever.
The following trends are observed:
In 2021, just like in 2020, Siemens had the largest number of advisories. In 2021, 36% of alerts were related to Siemens against 31% in 2020. The high number of advisories doesn’t mean that Siemens is less secure than their competitors, but instead that a lot of research and threat hunting has taken place for Siemens products and solutions. It shows that Siemens might actually have a relatively mature risk and vulnerability management program, and if Siemens mitigates those vulnerabilities, create patches, and helps their clients secure their products, they will be the most secure of the OEMs.
Finally, even if those vulnerabilities are important and operators, engineers, and asset owners shouldn’t take them lightly, there are still several of them that contained mistakes or issues. Of the 354 ICS advisories in 2021, 27% had issues with Vendor CPE (Common Platform Enumeration).
To collect data for comparison to the observations published for 2020, the Verve research team applied a similar approach:
We analyzed each ICS-CERT advisory for severity, exploit vectors, link to product names and software versions, what the relevant risk entailed, etc. We recorded, visited, and archived their information.
We checked to see if CVEs were missing/reserved, validated scores to determine if they were marked correctly, and did the CPE strings reflect initial expectations (e.g., did the vendor’s name match, or was the product’s name correct?).
The information was cross-referenced with data from previous years to identify tendencies and changes in the ICS market.
Verve analyzed the ICS-CERT alerts for the past several years. This provides a comprehensive view of all the publicly released vulnerability information. These numbers show a continuing escalation in the number of ICS vulnerabilities that operators must address.
At the high level, Verve found a 30% increase in total advisories in 2021 vs. 2020 and a 41% increase in the total number of CVEs. This difference is because many advisories contain multiple CVEs. These numbers immediately highlight the challenges that industrial organizations face in ensuring their systems are vulnerability-free. With systems/devices that often cannot be patched due to downtime or total system upgrade requirements, a general lack of inventory of assets/software/firmware/etc., and challenges when it comes to actively monitoring or scanning for vulnerabilities, ICS organizations and professionals have their work cut out for them to maintain their defenses.
From the ~376 original ICS-CERT advisories, medical devices (ICSMA) were excluded, and with the 354 advisories that remained, they had a collective average score via the tagged CVSS of 7.91 [High]. The average number of vulnerabilities (CVEs) per advisory was also higher than one.
In addition to the above summary statistics:
Importantly, while these numbers are large and growing, this analysis does exclude two types of additional vulnerabilities: 1) those that vendors do not release publicly, but share privately with their clients only, and 2) those that are still hidden in these “insecure by design” systems. The latter type of risk was highlighted recently with Vedere Labs’ release of the OT:ICEFALL vulnerability list. This release highlights the many hidden risks that exist in OT devices. Although less than 30% of these impacted industrial systems such as manufacturing, oil & gas, and utilities, the study highlights just how risky these systems can be.
This is one of the many reasons why managing risks is a complicated task. With many devices insecure by design, misconfigured, or don’t have any cybersecurity or compensating control around them, the fact that some vulnerabilities might not be detected or reported makes cybersecurity professionals’ work even more intricate.
Furthermore, the debate about even these publicly released vulnerabilities creates even more confusion.
Take the recently released OT:ICEFALL vulnerabilities for example. As Eric Byres of aDolus says, “This report from Forescout is not a serious or responsible vulnerability disclosure. Not only are most of the products old and often end-of-life, but these vulnerabilities are also old news.” Eric’s concern is that for most, if not all of these vulnerabilities, there is no available patch or they are very old software which has been regularly updated so customers could have remediated this with regular software upgrades. His concern is that these public releases may cause more harm than good by alerting attackers to “insecure-by-design” components with no clear resolution that a vendor could take.
While vulnerability reporting is critical for asset owners to reduce risk, what’s most important often gets lost in the hoopla and buzz of the latest threat. That is – to focus on the fundamentals and core principles of OT security. CISA’s recommendations remain the same: Execute well across your OT systems management program, and you’ll never have to worry about stopping the latest threat or chasing the shiny object.
The average CVSS scores have remained consistent over the years even as the number of CVEs increased drastically:
The vendors with the most disclosures are similar to previous years. When compared to 2020, the top five vendors varied on only one instance: Johnson Controls (with all its subsidiaries) took the second spot and Rockwell Automation got pushed out of the top five. In 2021, Rockwell is the 6th company with the most advisories (14).
By looking at the entire data sample, it is possible to observe the following:
In addition, from a data perspective this chart has multiple caveats that a reader needs to be aware of:
Of course, no ICS asset owner can patch all those vulnerabilities. Most ICS systems have a small threshold for risks related to patching (downtime, critical systems that cannot be rebooted, old systems that cannot be patched for performance reasons, etc.). That list of advisories is purely to help asset owners secure their environment, whether it’s by patching, being more attentive and careful to what’s happening out there (e.g. Monitoring), or with cybersecurity controls/ compensating controls.
Many vulnerabilities impact organizations whose business is in different industry verticals. This can be observed in the chart below where those observations can be made:
The vulnerability counts are consistent with the number of attacks observed on the various “traditional” OT sectors. According to previous research done by the Verve research team, the most targeted industries in 2020 were:
OT is clearly in the crosshairs of the cyber attackers, and manufacturing is at the center of all the OT/ICS cyber warfare game.
Compared to previous years, we filtered on each skill needed to exploit vulnerabilities to obtain the full amount of CVSS that can be exploited based on specific difficulty/vector/exploit and problem/issue fields.
When we looked at the previous year (2020), we saw that 76% of the advisories could be exploited remotely. For 2021, the proportion was lower with 67% of the advisories being at risk.
The details for 2021 are presented below:
If an attacker gains access, most vulnerabilities have a low attack complexity (75%) or are exploitable with relatively low skills (18%).
161 unique vulnerabilities/issue values were found. After doing sorting and counting, the top 5 vulnerabilities, as well as their frequency within CVSS are as follows:
In previous years, there may be lesser occurrence counts due to the overall numbers of CVEs being significantly lower (488 more CVEs in 2021 compared to 2020 and 226 between 2020 and 2019), and advisories (106 more in 2021 compared to 2020 and 56 more between 2020 and 2019).
However, there are similarities with 2020 when we look at the most common vulnerabilities that were reported by CISA in the ICS advisories. Buffer overflow is one of the top unique vulnerabilities for both 2021 and 2020 for example.
Of the 161 unique vulnerabilities that were found, 122 only affect between 1 and 5 advisories. This means that only 24% of the Vulnerabilities identified impact more than five advisories.
By adding all the vulnerabilities that impact many advisories, we got a total of 795 vulnerabilities for 354 advisories.
With that many vulnerabilities, there is a high number of advisories that have multiple vulnerabilities associated with them. According to the data collected, 44% of the advisories, so around 156 advisories, have more than one vulnerability associated with them. This is a lot and organizations need to seriously consider the ramification of having those affecting their OT/ICS operations.
Many of those vulnerabilities are without an all-inclusive fix, with many vendors offering the option to patch only a portion of the exposed products and versions, others suggesting to organizations that they upgrade their version to a more recent/latest iteration – with some specification that it will only reduce the risk and others that just don’t provide any information on the impact that these upgrades would have on the vulnerability – or putting forward compensating controls such as network segmentation and firewalls. There’s even a small segment of the vendors that just decided to offer no information to CISA regarding their corresponding advisories and instead request that clients contact them directly. As such, if the threat actors targeting the organization are intentionally trying to hack into an ICS network using sophisticated means, extended resources, ICS-specific skills, and high motivation, the company may be no match against these opponents.
The above summary can be quite scary for any controls engineer, asset owner, or cyber security executive. The number of published vulnerabilities is increasing drastically each year. To a certain extent, it can be considered a good thing as more organizations are transparent about their vulnerabilities and people are more vocal in the community. However, it also means that threat actors have a lot more information to work with to execute their attacks.
This news is a wake-up call to everyone trying to operate the critical control systems that operate so much of our economy. We need to do better to identify the vulnerabilities in our environments and eventually remediate those risks.
Remediation recommendations for these ICS vulnerabilities range from the application of specific patches or firmware updates to more mitigating measures such as ensuring configurations are reset, accounts disabled or passwords changed, or protecting network access. CISA regularly updates its guidance for OT/ICS systems with each major threat or risk announcement. And those recommendations are very consistent with security best practices. Their list includes items such as ensuring all OT/ICS devices are separated from corporate/enterprise networks, are regularly patched, have robust application whitelisting, etc. For the defenders, it is important to note these are consistent recommendations that do not evolve with each new threat. Most organizations can take heart that there is a well-defined roadmap of initiatives to provide greater security.
As of June 21st 2022, 168 ICS advisories have been published. Of those advisories, we filtered just like we did for 2021 for a comparable sample. As such, we removed 8 ICSMA (medical advisories) and rejected one advisory that didn’t have an advisory rating and CVEs from the list, for a total of 159 ICS advisories.
If we compare 2021 with 2022 with similar ratios, we see the following tendencies for the current/coming year:
As observed, advisories are not going down. The year is short from over, so this number could quickly increase. With the changing situation, whether we’re talking about the war in Ukraine or the evolution of the coronavirus, the number of attacks is on the rise, and the number of CVEs per advisory are growing rapidly.
What will happen with the rest of 2022 is still to be seen, but one thing is certain: organizations need to manage their risks and vulnerabilities by spending time, money, and resource on their mitigation and cybersecurity.
Download the PDF version of the 2021-22 ICS Advisory Report here.
A vulnerability review for 2019/2020. This document was performed as a summary piece highlighting the last two years of ICS advisories in an in-depth way.
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