The answer should be D. The question asks about the safety risk. Difficult to understand protocols don't threaten safety like the aspect of physical world effects like causing floods or gas line ruptures.
Performing a penetration test against an environment with SCADA (Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition) devices brings additional safety risks because these devices control critical infrastructure systems like power grids, water treatment plants, and manufacturing equipment.
Any disruption or unintended commands during testing could result in real-world physical consequences, such as equipment malfunction, operational failures, or even endangering human safety.
The main reason for the increased safety risk is that SCADA devices have the capability to cause physical world effects. SCADA systems are used in examples for GAS supply, the electronically controlled water system and so on. In case of malfunction, it leads to physical problems of no small magnitude!
Okay, this is one of those silly worded "gotcha" questions, ugh!! The question is asking about the safety risk as it relates to Pentesting, not as it relates to the devices. This is extremely poor wording, but essentially...the wrong answers all answer how the device poses a safety risk, but answer C is why a pentest/scan itself is a safety risk. There's an article linked when you click "Reveal Solution" that goes more in depth with it, but the gist is: these older protocols can cause system malfunctions if scanned with modern tools. So, it's how the scan itself is a safety risk...not so much the devices. Terrible question, CompTia.
The main reason for the increased safety risk is that SCADA devices have the capability to cause physical world effects. If a penetration tester were to compromise or manipulate the SCADA systems improperly, it could lead to disruptions or damages in the physical processes they control. For example, tampering with the control settings of a power plant's SCADA system could result in a power outage or equipment failure.
From the attached reference on the question itself, it is stated that: "A significant issue identified by Wiberg is that using active network scanners, such as Nmap, presents a weakness when attempting port recognition or service detection on SCADA devices. Wiberg states that active tools such as Nmap can use unusual TCP segment data to try and find available ports. Furthermore, they can open a massive amount of connections with a specific SCADA device but then fail to close them gracefully."
And since SCADA and ICS devices are designed and implemented with little attention having been paid to the operational security of these devices and their ability to handle errors or unexpected events, the presence idle open connections may result into errors that cannot be handled by the devices.
This will result into failure of the normal operation of the SCADA causing the physical world effects. This, AGAIN, brings me to be D as the right Answer.
upvoted 2 times
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