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Author(s):
S M Zia Ur Rashid Mohiuddin Ahmed Ashfaqul Haq Sayed Tanimun Hasan Abu Barkat Ullah Md Hasan Furhad
Journal
Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Abstract

In this study, we deployed scalable low-interaction honeypot in Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (AWS EC2) instance across six different regions to determine the current threat landscape as well as how knowledgeable and ingenious threat actors could be in compromising internet-facing ICS. This work is an extended version of our work published in 14th EAI International Wireless Internet Conference.

Concluding remarks
As the research progressed, more and more curious peers are drawn to our system. Threat actors also connected and exploited our honeypot systems, thinking of them as a real machine. The findings clearly indicate that current attacks in OT infrastructures follow similar attack trends for common IT environments. It is understood that each attacker follows his own “strateg” in order to be able to complete the attack. However, certain tasks of a general nature that they can carry out may be recognized as their goal. Specifically, the most common attack vectors against critical infrastructures include brute force authentication, remote code execution and buffer overflow attack on exposed devices through known vulnerabilities, malware attacks in the networks after post-exploitation. Our findings from this experiment should serve as cautionary examples for smart industries, particularly those that run internet-facing ICS, to ensure that adequate security measures are in place on their systems. In addition, malicious IPs, different attack types and origin, malware samples etc. can be used to train artificial intelligence (AI) based intrusion detection system (IDS) to adapt and build a better cyber defense system.

Reference details

DOI
10.1007/s11276-022-03057-y
Resource type
Journal Article
Year of Publication
2024
ISSN Number
1022-0038
Publication Area
Cybersecurity and defense
Date Published
2022-07-18

How to cite this reference:

Rashid, S. M. Z. U., Ahmed, M., Haq, A., Hasan, S. T., Ullah, A. B., & Furhad, M. H. (2024). Faking smart industry: exploring cyber-threat landscape deploying cloud-based honeypot. Springer Science and Business Media LLC. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11276-022-03057-y (Original work published)