Fee: $3995 – Includes certificate of course completion, all meals and access to all conference sessions and social functions.

Note: This hands on training will take place Tuesday, October 6th – Thursday, October 8th. Day 1 will be a full day, and Day 2 and 3 will be half days. Students will be able to attend sessions of the core ICS Cybersecurity Conference and access instructors event when the workshop is not in session.

Cyber-physical systems, i.e. systems that bridge the cyber and physical domains, are attractive targets for attack partially due to the possibility of causing real-world physical loss to the victim.

Have you ever wondered how cyber adversaries execute these sort of attacks? Do you see attacks in the news and wonder, “how did the attacker even think to do that?” Do you stay up at night thinking, “could that happen to my system?” Developers want their systems to be secure and need to understand the threat. Unfortunately, broad intel reports and vague proclamations about adversary capability and intent may not give developers a concrete understanding of what they can do to make their systems more secure.

This Cyber Attack Methods course takes a unique approach to meeting this need, putting students into the shoes of an attacker — walking them through the steps of system discovery, exploitation, and delivering a mission-impacting attack against an intentionally vulnerable virtual cyber physical system with their hands on the keyboard. In this course we won’t turn you into a hacker, but you will learn to think like one!

Course Objectives:

Provide an understanding of methods that an attacker may use against cyber-physical systems and their impact on mission readiness, capability, confidentiality, integrity, availability, productivity, or revenue.
With hands-on keyboard, develop and execute attacks against a representative cyber-physical system; discuss and evaluate mitigations against these attacks.
Foster an attacker mindset, enabling participants to think like bad actors, walk through attack methods related to historic exploits, and apply that knowledge to making systems more secure.
What students should know beforehand:

There are no firm prerequisites for the course although it’s primarily aimed towards systems engineers, system security engineers and developers. Students will get the most benefit if they are somewhat familiar with using the Linux command line and have done some programming. That being said, it is a guided tour – student’s hands will be on the keyboard but instructors will lead them all the way through.

What students will learn:

Tangible appreciation for adversary mindset, tactics, techniques and procedures related to enumerating and exploiting weaknesses in cyber physical systems. They will also learn to think through real-world mitigations and design choices to reduce attack surface and provide greater protections in the systems they design, build, or oversee.