Based on past cyberattack incidents, we can see that there would be major consequences in OT environments should these assets be compromised. With our threat research team at TXOne, this whitepaper was written to fulfill the following objectives:

• Investigate programmable assets commonly used in OT environments
• Analyze the lifecycle of programmable assets
• Analyze and review the findings of previous researchers on programmable assets
• Supplement insufficiencies found in previous threat research on programmable assets
• Propose novel attack vectors made possible by the characteristics of programmable assets
• Propose countermeasures against these attacks