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SecurityWeek is thrilled to announce a new, multi-day, hands-on training course offering taking place alongside the 2025 ICS Cybersecurity Conference.

US ONLY: This training is available for United States Citizens only.

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

Limited seats available. Reserve your spot today!

Note: This hands on training will take place Tuesday, October 28th – Thursday, October 30th. 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. Access to all conference meals and networking events is also included.

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:

Students will gain a 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.

What students need to bring: Students will need to bring an Intel-based laptop capable of running a virtual machine as detailed below. Sorry, ARM-based MacBooks are not supported.

The CAM Virtual Machine requires the host to run either Oracle VirtualBox or VMWare Workstation with the minimum specs provided by the vendors:

• VirtualBox: https://docs.oracle.com/html/E50247_08/vmiug-server-hardware.html
• VMWare: https://www.vmware.com/products/workstation-player.html

Additional requirements specific to the Ubuntu 22.04 guest VM we provide are:

• Memory – 8GB on host (4GB allocated to VM)
• Processors – 2 (no virtualization settings needed)
• Hard disk storage – 20GB

What students will be provided with: Students will be provided with a self-contained virtual machine that contains the CAM simulation, exercises and lesson content. This VM has no expiration date and students are free to continue to learn utilizing it even after the class.

Prerequisites

To get the most out of the class, students should have some familiarity with programming and operating on the command line.

Target Audience

Programmers, testers, systems engineers. No previous cybersecurity experience is required.

Meet the Instructors:

MTSI’s CPS team is a group of highly experienced hackers, reverse engineers and pentesters. They have years of experience testing mission critical systems in aviation, maritime, weapons, and defense systems. They conduct research into cyber physical system security and are often invited to share their perspectives at national conferences. They also routinely compete and place highly at world renowned hacking competitions including Mandiant’s FlareOn RE Challenge and DEFCON where the team placed 1^st at the ICS Village CTF during DEFCON32.

US ONLY: This training is available for United States Citizens only.