Are any external connections being set up?.What is normal communication between those devices?.Who are those devices communicating to?.To be able to answer the variety of “how do you know” questions, it comes down to knowing your network and placing preventative controls around it to be able to continuously answer questions like these: How do you know if data is coming in or going out of your network? How do you know if there are external connections being set up for ease of use for employees, contractors, or vendors? What’s the best management strategy? Questions to Consider We do not need to worry about cybersecurity”? If that is the case, how does someone know if they are air-gapped if they do not assess or monitor their networks for new data coming in from removable media/transient devices or external network connections being set up with modems or VPN’s?Īt the end of the day, new data is coming into these so-called “air-gapped” environments. Do air-gaps give us a false sense of security? How many times do cybersecurity professionals hear, “Oh, we are air-gapped. Are these environments truly air-gapped?Īll of these examples prove that nothing is truly air-gapped or that it can’t stay 100% air-gapped over time. What about transient devices such as laptops, tablets and smart phones? Don’t forget about removable media (USB, CD-ROM, et al.), remote access and data coming via sneakernet (any means of transferring data without it traversing a network). There are many other non-threatening examples like modems and wireless networks being set up by contractors, maintenance, or control engineers to make their lives easier to transfer data in or out of the air-gapped networks. The most famous of these examples is Stuxnet, the worm that was able to target and disrupt the process of enriching uranium that could be used to manufacture nuclear warheads in Iran’s Natanz nuclear facility. It has been proven in a number of different scenarios that air-gapped networks can be infiltrated. Do they really guarantee isolation from the internet or from the corporate business network? In theory, air-gapped networks seem like a good idea. Are Air-Gapped Systems Really Secure and Effective? With more and more “smart” field devices (connected and managed through the network), the notion of whether air-gapped industrial networks are practical for the future, or if there is really an air-gapped network today, is worth considering. In today’s Industry 4.0 revolution-where the network is the control system-analyzing data from the industrial process is key to driving optimization and efficiency. In the industrial vertical, these air-gapped networks were the networks that supported the industrial control systems within the plant or factory where communication was physically or logically isolated between the plant and the enterprise networks. This can be a good thing or bad thing depending on your network needs. , arXiv: networks across a variety of verticals including government, military, financial services, power plants, and industrial manufacturing have been so-called “air-gapped.” This means they are physically and logically isolated from other networks where communication between these networks is not physically or logically possible. 2, Table 1, Summary of Existing Air-Gap Covert Channels. ‘AIR-FI: Generating covert wifi signals from air-gapped computers’. ‘Why on-device detection matters: New Ramsay trojan targets air-gapped networks’. 3 ‘Project Sauron malware hidden for five years’.‘HVACKer: Bridging the Air-Gap by Attacking the Air Conditioning System’. 2 Mirsky, Yisroel Guri, Mordechai Elovici, Yuval.security-101/advanced-persistent-threat-apt/. 1 ‘What is an Advanced Persistent Threat (APT)?’.
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