SCADA Forensics

Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) systems and Industrial Control Systems (ICS) are the operational backbone of most critical infrastructure: oil and gas pipelines, power generation and distribution, water treatment facilities, refineries, and manufacturing plants. A cyber attack or deliberate sabotage targeting these systems does not just cause financial loss. It can endanger lives, trigger environmental disasters, and create national security consequences that extend well beyond the incident itself.

We are one of a very small number of organisations on the continent with the specialised expertise to conduct forensic investigations in SCADA and ICS environments, where a mistaken action during an investigation can have consequences that are physical, not just digital.

THE GROWING THREAT TO OPERATIONAL TECHNOLOGY

The threat is not new. Stuxnet, Triton/TRISIS, and Industroyer showed over a decade ago that nation-state actors were already developing attack tools built specifically for industrial control systems. The sophistication and frequency of those attacks has grown since then, not declined.

The convergence of IT and OT networks has made things considerably worse. As organisations connect legacy SCADA systems to corporate networks and the internet, systems that were once effectively isolated are now reachable. The attack surface for critical infrastructure has expanded substantially as a result.

Nigeria's energy and oil and gas sectors face pressure from cyber actors, saboteurs, and insider threats on a scale that has increased noticeably in recent years. A single successful OT attack can halt production, damage equipment that takes months to replace, and trigger environmental and safety incidents with costs that run into the hundreds of millions.

Most SCADA environments were also built for reliability rather than security. Many still run operating systems and protocols that were not designed with adversarial conditions in mind, and retrofitting security onto them is rarely straightforward.

WHAT WE DO

SCADA Incident Investigation

When an incident occurs in an operational technology environment, whether a cyber attack, deliberate sabotage, or unexplained system failure, we conduct a forensic investigation that identifies the cause, scope, and origin without disrupting active operations.

OT Network Analysis

We analyse the communications and logs of SCADA networks and historians, identifying anomalous activity, unauthorised commands, and malicious traffic within industrial protocols including Modbus, DNP3, and OPC.

Malware and Intrusion Analysis in OT Environments

Industrial malware behaves differently from conventional threats. Our examiners understand OT-specific attack tools and can identify, isolate, and analyse malicious code in SCADA environments without triggering unintended physical effects.

Evidence Preservation and Chain of Custody

Forensic evidence from OT environments is collected with the same rigour as any other investigation, ensuring findings hold up for regulatory reporting, insurance claims, and legal proceedings.

Post-Incident Recovery Support

Following an OT incident, we assist in the safe and verified restoration of SCADA systems, confirming that no malicious persistence remains before anything goes back into operational service.

SCADA Security Assessment

Beyond reactive forensics, we assess the forensic readiness and security posture of SCADA environments, identifying logging gaps, visibility blind spots, and vulnerabilities that an attacker could exploit before one does.

SCADA forensics requires a combination of industrial systems expertise, cybersecurity knowledge, and forensic discipline that very few teams have developed together. Ours has, through direct engagement with Nigeria's energy and industrial sectors over a number of years. We understand how these environments are built, how they fail, and how to investigate them without making the situation worse.