Malware Analysis and Classification

Abstract

Malicious applications can be a security threat to Cyber-physical systems as these systems are composed of heterogeneous distributed systems and mostly depends on the internet, ICT services and products. The usage of ICT products and services gives the opportunity of less expensive data collection, intelligent control and decision systems using automated data mining tools. Cyber-physical systems become exposed to the internet and the public networks as they have integrated to the ICT networks for easy automated options. Cyber-attacks can lead to functional failure, blackouts, energy theft, data theft etc. and this will be a critical security concern for Cyber-physical systems. There have been many instances of cyber-attacks on CPS systems earlier, the most popular being the Stuxnet virus attack. In total there have been 7 instances of such attacks on CPS systems that have the potential to totally cripple critical infrastructures causing huge business impacts including loss of life in some cases. Earlier these CPS or process level systems used to work in an isolated manner with very less intelligence, but as the convergence between CPS and IT is increasing their cyber-attack surface is increasing for threat actors to exploit. Therefore, in this chapter, the authors shall be seeing the technical threats in the form of malware which can exploit the CPS systems and how it can be protected from cyber-attacks.