Novel challenges for anomaly detection in l&C networks. Strategic preparation for the advent of information hiding based attacks

Nowadays, there are a lot of defense mechanisms to secure IT-systems against Cyber attacks. Thus, Cyber attacks have to be more sophisticated than they used to be in order to stay undetected as long as possible and to bypass defense mechanisms. As a result, current threats frequently use steganographic techniques to hide malicious functions in a harmless looking carrier. In [1] an attack for Siemens S7 Sirnatic Programmable Logic Controllers (PLCs) is presented, where the control logic of the PLC is modified while the source code which the PLC presents the engineering station is retained. As a result, the PLCs functionality is different from the control logic presented to the engineering station. Furthermore, steganographic techniques are frequently used to hide information in media files.