A groundbreaking study leveraging advanced application-layer scanning has exposed approximately 150,000 industrial control systems (ICS) worldwide that are directly accessible on the public internet, posing severe risks of catastrophic cyberattacks.
Conducted over a year from January 2024 to January 2025, this research utilizing comprehensive IPv4 scanning data from Censys targets 17 widely used ICS protocols, including Modbus, Niagara Fox, and IEC 60870-5-104.
These systems, integral to critical infrastructure such as electric grids, water supply networks, and manufacturing plants, are often not designed with robust security, transmitting data in plain text or with minimal authentication.
The findings underscore the urgent need for enhanced cybersecurity measures to protect these vital assets from malicious exploitation, as historical incidents like Stuxnet and the 2015 Ukraine power outage demonstrate the devastating potential of such vulnerabilities.
Exposure of Critical Infrastructure
The study’s methodology marks a significant advancement over previous efforts by incorporating application-layer handshakes across all 65,536 ports, ensuring accurate identification of ICS devices beyond mere open-port detection.
This approach revealed around 140,000 unique hosts in 175 countries as of April 2024, with the number slightly increasing by January 2025.
The United States hosts the largest share, with over 45,000 exposed systems, followed by countries like Turkey and Italy.
However, a startling revelation is the presence of honeypots decoy systems mimicking ICS to trap attackers constituting 15% of exposed hosts in April 2024, rising to 25% by January 2025.
Classified into low, medium, and high-confidence categories using heuristics like network type, open port counts, and known signatures, these honeypots (with two-thirds in medium or high-confidence tiers) suggest previous studies may have overestimated genuine ICS exposure by failing to account for such decoys.
This discrepancy challenges earlier cybersecurity assessments and highlights the sophistication of modern honeypot deployments, some emulating multiple unrelated protocols on a single host.
High Prevalence of Honeypots
Geographical and protocol-specific variations further complicate the cybersecurity landscape.
Modbus dominates as the most exposed protocol globally, particularly in Europe and South America, while Niagara Fox leads in the US, and IEC 60870-5-104 prevails in parts of Eastern Europe and Central Asia.
The study also identifies unusual honeypot concentrations in datacenter networks, with nearly 40% hosted on Amazon’s autonomous systems, indicating strategic placements by security researchers or organizations.
Additionally, some honeypots exhibit thousands of open ports, emulating diverse services from Bitcoin to ElasticSearch alongside ICS protocols, a behavior uncharacteristic of genuine industrial systems.
These findings suggest the presence of advanced, multi-protocol honeypot families, previously undocumented in ICS research.
The implications of this research are profound for both industry operators and cybersecurity professionals.
Exposed ICS devices, if not isolated via air-gapping or secured through VPNs with strong authentication, remain prime targets for zero-day exploits and other threats.
The study advocates for continuous monitoring using attack surface management tools to detect inadvertent exposures swiftly.
Meanwhile, honeypot operators can leverage these insights to enhance stealthiness, avoiding detection by adversaries who might blacklist identifiable decoys.
As the researchers plan to extend their analysis to IPv6 and refine ICS signatures, this work serves as a critical wake-up call, urging immediate action to safeguard the backbone of modern industrial operations from cyber threats that could disrupt societal stability on a massive scale.
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