Design and Development of Automated Threat Hunting in Industrial Control Systems

Abstract

Traditional industrial systems, e.g., power plants, water treatment plants, etc., were built to operate highly isolated and controlled capacity. Recently, Industrial Control Systems (ICSs) have been exposed to the Internet for ease of access and adaptation to advanced technologies. However, it creates security vulnerabilities. Attackers often exploit these vulnerabilities to launch an attack on ICSs. Towards this, threat hunting is performed to proactively monitor the security of ICS networks and protect them against threats that could make the systems malfunction. A threat hunter manually identifies threats and provides a hypothesis based on the available threat intelligence. In this paper, we motivate the gap in lacking research in the automation of threat hunting in ICS networks. We propose an automated extraction of threat intelligence and the generation and validation of a hypothesis. We present an automated threat hunting framework based on threat intelligence provided by the ICS MITRE ATT&CK framework to automate the tasks. Unlike the existing hunting solutions which are cloud-based, costly and prone to human errors, our solution is a central and opensource implemented using different open-source technologies, e.g., Elasticsearch, Conpot, Metasploit, Web Single Page Application (SPA), and a machine learning analyser. Our results demonstrate that the proposed threat hunting solution can identify the network's attacks and alert a threat hunter with a hypothesis generated based on the techniques, tactics, and procedures (TTPs) from ICS MITRE ATT&CK. Then, a machine learning classifier automatically predicts the future actions of the attack.