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T0814 Denial of Service

Adversaries may perform Denial-of-Service (DoS) attacks to disrupt expected device functionality. Examples of DoS attacks include overwhelming the target device with a high volume of requests in a short time period and sending the target device a request it does not know how to handle. Disrupting device state may temporarily render it unresponsive, possibly lasting until a reboot can occur. When placed in this state, devices may be unable to send and receive requests, and may not perform expected response functions in reaction to other events in the environment.

Some ICS devices are particularly sensitive to DoS events, and may become unresponsive in reaction to even a simple ping sweep. Adversaries may also attempt to execute a Permanent Denial-of-Service (PDoS) against certain devices, such as in the case of the BrickerBot malware. 2

Adversaries may exploit a software vulnerability to cause a denial of service by taking advantage of a programming error in a program, service, or within the operating system software or kernel itself to execute adversary-controlled code. Vulnerabilities may exist in software that can be used to cause a denial of service condition.

Adversaries may have prior knowledge about industrial protocols or control devices used in the environment through Remote System Information Discovery. There are examples of adversaries remotely causing a Device Restart/Shutdown by exploiting a vulnerability that induces uncontrolled resource consumption. 3 1 4

Item Value
ID T0814
Sub-techniques
Tactics TA0107
Platforms Field Controller/RTU/PLC/IED, Safety Instrumented System/Protection Relay
Version 1.1
Created 21 May 2020
Last Modified 30 March 2023

Procedure Examples

ID Name Description
S0093 Backdoor.Oldrea The Backdoor.Oldrea payload has caused multiple common OPC platforms to intermittently crash. This could cause a denial of service effect on applications reliant on OPC communications. 3
S0604 Industroyer The Industroyer SIPROTEC DoS module exploits the CVE-2015-5374 vulnerability in order to render a Siemens SIPROTEC device unresponsive. Once this vulnerability is successfully exploited, the target device stops responding to any commands until it is rebooted manually. 6 Once the tool is executed it sends specifically crafted packets to port 50,000 of the target IP addresses using UDP. The UDP packet contains the following 18 byte payload: 0x11 49 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 28 9E. 6
S1006 PLC-Blaster The execution on the PLC can be stopped by violating the cycle time limit. The PLC-Blaster implements an endless loop triggering an error condition within the PLC with the impact of a DoS. 5

Mitigations

ID Mitigation Description
M0815 Watchdog Timers System and process restarts should be performed when a timeout condition occurs.

Detection

ID Data Source Data Component
DS0015 Application Log Application Log Content
DS0029 Network Traffic Network Traffic Content
DS0040 Operational Databases Process History/Live Data

References

  1. Common Weakness Enumeration 2019, January 03 CWE-400: Uncontrolled Resource Consumption Retrieved. 2019/03/14  ↩

  2. ICS-CERT 2017, April 18 CS Alert (ICS-ALERT-17-102-01A) BrickerBot Permanent Denial-of-Service Attack Retrieved. 2019/10/24  ↩

  3. ICS-CERT 2018, August 27 Advisory (ICSA-15-202-01) - Siemens SIPROTEC Denial-of-Service Vulnerability Retrieved. 2019/03/14  ↩↩

  4. MITRE 2018, March 22 CVE-2015-5374 Retrieved. 2019/03/14  ↩

  5. Spenneberg, Ralf, Maik Brggemann, and Hendrik Schwartke 2016, March 31 Plc-blaster: A worm living solely in the plc. Retrieved. 2017/09/19  ↩

  6. Anton Cherepanov, ESET 2017, June 12 Win32/Industroyer: A new threat for industrial control systems Retrieved. 2017/09/15  ↩↩