IEC 62443-3-2 and 62443-3-3
The plant is built to the zone model, and graded in its vocabulary
Three things in the range carry the standard: the detections a scenario raises, the breach timeline behind them, and the case console the analyst fills in. Each one is written against a foundational requirement, and each detection is anchored to a documented incident rather than an attack step invented for a lesson.
- 8
- graded scenarios
- 27
- scenario detections
- 20
- ATT&CK for ICS techniques
- 9
- documented incidents behind them
Scenario detections
62443-3-3 SR 6.1 and SR 6.2 — audit accessibility and continuous monitoring.
A scenario does not raise a generic alarm. Each detection names the behavior, the ATT&CK for ICS technique it is written against, the incident where that behavior was recorded on a real plant, and the requirement it is evidence for. 27 detections across 8 scenarios, all of them traceable.
Breach timeline
62443-3-2 risk assessment — threat, likely capability, consequence.
23 timeline stages, each one a line from a published incident on the left and what the learner can see of it on the plant on the right. The assumed adversary capability is stated per scenario as a security level, which is the input a zone's target SL is argued from.
Case console
62443-3-3 SR 6.2 and the availability priority behind FR 7.
The record the analyst files is the assessment: the affected asset, what happened, the zone boundary that was crossed, and the response. Containment that would blind the control room loses marks, because in a plant availability outranks a clean IT answer.
Zones and conduits the estate enforces
62443-3-2 zone and conduit design; target security levels SL 1 to SL 4.
Z-SAFETY · Purdue L0, L1
Safety controller and its interlocks, on its own conduit and never routed.
An attacker with ICS-specific skills, tools and moderate resources.
Z-CONTROL · Purdue L1, L2
PLC-201 and PLC-204, HMI-110, the serial gateway GW-260.
An attacker with ICS-specific skills, tools and moderate resources.
Z-OPS · Purdue L3
HIST-320 process historian, batch records, the engineering workstation.
A low-skill attacker with generic tools and low motivation.
Z-DMZ · Purdue L3.5
Replicated historian, jump host, patch staging — the only way in from business IT.
A low-skill attacker with generic tools and low motivation.
Z-ENTERPRISE · Purdue L4
Corporate IT. Treated as untrusted by everything below it.
Protection against accidental misuse.
Declared conduits
- C-01 Z-CONTROL → Z-OPSHistorian collection, read-only, one direction.Watched for: A write function code arriving from the historian's address.
- C-02 Z-OPS → Z-DMZHistorian replication and batch-record export.Watched for: Volume or destinations the historian has never used before.
- C-03 Z-DMZ → Z-ENTERPRISEBrokered reads from the replica only. No session reaches the plant.Watched for: Any flow that terminates below the DMZ.
- C-04 Z-CONTROL → Z-SAFETYNothing. The safety system is monitored, never commanded.Watched for: Any packet at all.
Detection coverage by foundational requirement
62443-3-3 FR 1 to FR 7. A requirement is only counted where a detection and a graded decision stand behind it.
- FR1 Identification and authentication control4 detections
Every human, device and software process on the control network is identified.
- FR2 Use control5 detections
Identified users and devices may only do what their role permits, and it is logged.
- FR3 System integrity4 detections
Control logic, firmware and process data are not altered without being noticed.
- FR4 Data confidentiality1 detection
Recipes, batch records and process data stay inside the zone that owns them.
- FR5 Restricted data flow5 detections
Zones are segmented and traffic crosses only through declared conduits.
- FR6 Timely response to events4 detections
The plant notices a security event and responds without losing the process.
- FR7 Resource availability4 detections
Control keeps running — availability outranks a clean IT containment.
The incidents the scenarios are modeled on
Published incident reporting and government advisories. Links go to the source, not to us.
- Maroochy Shire sewage spills2000 · Water and wastewater
An insider used a legitimate radio master to issue pump commands and falsify the state reported back, releasing around a million liters of sewage before anyone accepted the control system was under attack rather than faulty.
A former contractor with the vendor's own radio equipment
- Stuxnet2010 · Nuclear enrichment
Controller logic was rewritten from the engineering environment while the operator display was fed recorded normal values, so the process was damaged over months with the screens showing nothing wrong.
State-sponsored; delivered via removable media and the engineering toolchain
- Ukraine electric power attack2015 · Electric distribution
Operators watched their own HMIs being driven from elsewhere: breakers were opened over legitimate remote sessions with valid accounts, and the call center was flooded so the loss of power took longer to confirm.
Sandworm, using BlackEnergy and KillDisk
- Industroyer / CRASHOVERRIDE2016, repeated as Industroyer2 in 2022 · Electric transmission
Purpose-built malware spoke the substation protocols natively — no exploit required — sending valid-looking command messages to open breakers, and disabling protective relays so the response would be slower than the damage.
Sandworm
- TRITON / TRISIS2017 · Petrochemical
The first malware written to reprogram a safety instrumented system: it reached the safety controller from an engineering workstation and attempted to leave the plant running with its last line of protection removed.
State-sponsored, via an engineering workstation left on the safety network
- Dragonfly / Energetic Bear energy-sector intrusions2014–2018 · Energy and critical manufacturing
The objective was operational information rather than disruption: engineering documents, network diagrams and historian data were collected and staged out through the business boundary over long periods.
Russian state-sponsored actors
- PIPEDREAM / INCONTROLLER2022 · Cross-sector ICS
A modular toolkit that scans for controllers, changes their operating mode, downloads programs and rewrites parameters using nothing but the vendors' own protocols and defaults.
State-aligned; disclosed before it was used against a plant
- FrostyGoop heating outage2024 · District heating
Plain Modbus writes to heating controllers made them report wrong measurements and run the wrong way, leaving more than six hundred buildings without heat in winter for two days.
Unattributed; reached the controllers through an exposed network device
- Unitronics PLC and HMI intrusions2023 · Water and wastewater
Internet-reachable controllers with default credentials were logged into directly and their operator panels defaced, forcing several utilities onto manual operation.
CyberAv3ngers
Requirement numbers, security levels, technique identifiers and advisory numbers are used as published by the IEC, MITRE and CISA. The mapping between them and Forge content is ours, offered to help you plan; it is not an accreditation, a certification or a conformity assessment, and no authority has reviewed it. The plant is fully simulated — no controller, protocol or process exists.