A Beginner’s Guide to Hacking Powerplants

Date: Fall 25
Event: Computer Security Group

Recording

Slides

Summary

A student-friendly rendition of the DC214 ICS hacking talk. I focused more on giving smaller amount of more digestable information, and didn’t spend nearly as long as I could’ve on the demo. As with any student org talk the main goal was to inspire at least 1 person in the room to go home and try this out themselves.

The most popular question post-tech talk was how to get started making one of these envrionemnts. I recommend NOT doing what I did, as I had little familiarty with the concept and just took a shot in the dark with tools and approach.

I would start off by constructing the environment in docker containers, not in virtual machines. Either way you’ll have to fight with making a vlan and networking this setup - might as well do it in a less laggy-lightweight design. I wouldn’t use ScadaBR to construct the HMI. As neat as it was, use NodeRED. It’s a little more robust with its programming/events and simplifies the project considerably. Plus it leaves more room of extension - say to build a fully-fledged cyber-physical system.

[TBD attach my project files here somewhere]