Industrial Control Systems (ICS) increasingly depends upon on integrated IT infrastructures, exposing hardware-level components such as Programmable Logic Controllers (PLCs), industrial routers, and IIoT gateways to cyber-physical attacks. However, existing research mainly focuses on isolated device-level exploits and lacks a generalized methodology for analyzing hardware vulnerabilities. This paper addresses this gap by including a general framework for identifying and exploiting exposed hardware interfaces—specifically JTAG and UART ports—to demonstrate their impact on ICS security. The study evaluates JTAG-based PLC memory acquisition using Bus Pirate and OpenOCD, and demonstrates firmware extraction from a Digisol router by exploiting the Incorrect Access Control vulnerability (CVE-2024-4231). The results shows how unprotected debug interfaces in ICS devices pose significant risks to …