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Manufacturing

OT/SCADA Security Assessment for a Fortune 500 Manufacturing Conglomerate

12 critical vulnerabilities found in industrial control systems, including an air-gap bypass path

Client: Fortune 500 Manufacturing Conglomerate

12
Critical vulnerabilities found in industrial control systems
6
IT-to-OT lateral movement paths identified and segmented
0
Production downtime during entire assessment
340+
OT assets discovered and mapped for the first time

The Challenge

IT/OT Convergence Created Unseen Attack Paths to Industrial Control Systems

A Fortune 500 manufacturer operating 14 production facilities across India had recently connected legacy SCADA systems to the corporate network for centralised monitoring. The OT team believed their air-gapped systems were secure, but the CISO suspected that IT/OT convergence had created attack paths that traditional IT security teams would not find.

  • Legacy SCADA systems (some 15+ years old) now connected to corporate network
  • No OT-specific security assessment ever conducted across any facility
  • Production downtime costs exceeding INR 2 crore per hour at primary smelting facility
  • Board-level concern after industry peer suffered ransomware-induced production shutdown

The Solution

Non-Intrusive OT Penetration Testing Across 3 Critical Facilities

Security Brigade deployed a specialised OT security team for non-intrusive assessment of SCADA, DCS, and PLC systems across 3 critical production facilities. The assessment combined passive network analysis, configuration review, and controlled active testing during scheduled maintenance windows. Production was never interrupted.

Services used

OT/SCADA SecurityNetwork Penetration TestingRed Team Assessment

Our approach

  1. 01Phase 1: Passive OT network mapping. Network taps identified 340+ OT assets, including 47 PLCs, 12 HMIs, and 8 SCADA servers
  2. 02Phase 2: IT/OT convergence analysis. Traced 6 paths from the corporate network into the OT zone, including 1 direct route via a misconfigured historian server
  3. 03Phase 3: Controlled active testing during a planned shutdown. Tested PLC firmware, HMI web interfaces, and SCADA protocol authentication
  4. 04Phase 4: Air-gap validation. Demonstrated a bypass via a compromised engineering workstation with dual-homed network interfaces

The Results

12 Critical OT Vulnerabilities Remediated, Air-Gap Bypass Path Eliminated

Discovered 12 critical vulnerabilities including a complete air-gap bypass chain via a dual-homed engineering workstation. The historian server path alone could have given an attacker direct write access to PLC registers controlling furnace temperature. All critical findings remediated within 8 weeks.

12
Critical vulnerabilities found in industrial control systems
6
IT-to-OT lateral movement paths identified and segmented
0
Production downtime during entire assessment
340+
OT assets discovered and mapped for the first time

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