The Rise of ICS Malware: A Comparative Analysis

Cyber attacks against Industrial Control Systems are one of the major concerns for worldwide manufacturing companies. With the growth of emerging technologies, protecting large-scale Critical Infrastructures has become a considerable research topic in the past decade. Nowadays, software used to monitor Industrial Control Systems might be malicious and cause harm not only to physical processes but also to people working in industrial environments. To that end, integrating safety and security in Industrial Control Systems requires a well-developed understanding of malware-based cyber attacks. In this paper, we present a comparative analysis framework of ICS Malware in a bi-layered approach: A cyber threat intelligence layer based on the ICS cyber kill chain and a hybrid analysis layer based on a static and dynamic analysis of ICS malware. We evaluated our proposed method by experimenting five well-known ICS malware: Stuxnet, Havex, BlackEnergy2, CrashOverride, and TRISIS. Our comparative analysis results show different and similar strategies used by each ICS malware to disrupt the ICS environment.