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Simulating Attacks Against Hydroelectric Power Plants

Julia Dewitz-Würzelberger

Demonstrates full-chain adversary emulation against a hydroelectric power plant firing range and details the resulting incident response analysis.

Summary

Value of ICS Firing Ranges

Evaluating critical infrastructure cybersecurity requires realistic simulation environments. An ICS firing range was constructed to model the physical processes and network architecture of a hydroelectric power station.

Firing Range Architecture and Flooding Scenario

The testbed simulates a catastrophic flooding scenario, integrating Active Directory domains, industrial controllers, virtualized networks, and intentionally placed vulnerabilities.

Executing Red Team Adversary Emulation

Red team operators established command-and-control infrastructure and executed a multi-stage attack kill chain across the environment, directly impacting simulated hydroelectric turbines.

Blue Team DFIR Analysis and Training

Defenders from the power utility analyzed forensic artifacts left during the exercise, inspecting network PCAPs, memory dumps, and Windows event logs to validate detection capabilities.

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