About the cybersecurity of automated process control systems

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Recently, the number of hacker attacks on industrial production facilities has increased significantly. That growth is associated with the rapid development of information technologies for the control systems. The increase in the number of incidents has led to the emergence of cybersecurity – a new field of scientific and technical research that deals with the industrial companies security issues. Several widely discussed incidents are related to cybersecurity. For example, the STUXNET worm has infected Siemens industrial systems and inflicted heavy losses for the Iranian nuclear program. That worm made use of operating system vulnerabilities and the «human factor». The STUXNET worm has been also served as the basis for a number of modified viruses that have been used to successfully attack on various industrial networks. As Siemens is one of the world’s key manufacturers of industrial equipment, the STUXNET has become widespread. Currently, many publications discuss STUXNET from different points of view. Researchers dealing with this problem often overlook the important fact that the existing standard communication protocols, interaction interfaces and embedded algorithms are in most cases unreliable and are not able to provide the proper level of security, but they focus on the vulnerabilities of intrusion detection and prevention systems. With the increasing number of cyber attacks and their expansion, it is necessary to develop secure communication channels and devices to implement the concept of safe industrial manufacturing. This paper analyzes modern process control systems from the point of view of information security.