What you can learn from Cisco Talos’ new oil pumpjack workshop

Paul Rascagneres wrote this blog post with contributions from Patrick DeSantis from Cisco Talos ARES (Advanced Research/Embedded Systems).

Executive summary

Every day, more industrial control systems (ICS) become vulnerable to cyber attacks. As these massive, critical machines become more interconnected to networks, it increases the ways in which attackers could disrupt their operations and makes it tougher for those who protect organizations’ networks to cover all possible attack vectors. To demonstrate how these ICSs interact with a network, we are releasing a model of a 3-D printed oil pumpjack connected to a simulated programmable logic controller (PLC) supporting two industrial protocols. Throughout the year, Talos will have this model at several workshops where attendees can try it out for themselves. For convenience, we are also providing the blueprints and code to even test this out for yourself at home.

We are releasing the 3-D printed model of the pumpjack, the Arduino source code (including the Modbus over TCP and the EtherNet/IP protocols), as well as the code for the human-machine interface (HMI) to control the pump over a network.

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