A Survey on Cybersecurity Threats in Industrial and Information Technology Environments: Advancements and Resilience Through Network Steganographic Techniques

Abstract

The complex interplay of Operational Technology (OT) and Information Technology (IT) daily supports critical infrastructures managing energy, transportation, manufacturing, and utilities. Due to their importance, the number of attacks targeting IT/OT scenarios has increased. The most sophisticated malware relies on techniques such as encryption, obfuscation, or social engineering. An emerging trend is to use some form of information hiding, mainly to create covert communications cloaked within network traffic. This article analyzes eight major IT/OT threats in the view of their empowerment via steganography. The goal of this work is to anticipate the evolution of malicious software targeting IT/OT scenarios when endowed with advanced data hiding schemes, i.e., multi-level steganography. Our analysis clearly indicates that the ability of cloaking data within IT/OT deployments should be considered a real danger. Moreover, current mitigation techniques are only partially adequate to face such a new-wave of attacks. Hence, we provide some gaps to be filled by researchers and security experts for improving detection techniques and implementing defenses against emerging cybersecurity threats.