Cybersecurity: “Securing the Industrial World Is Not the Same as Securing the Corporate World”>
– Camille Rustici
Attacks on industrial facilities and critical infrastructure are on the rise.
This is the result of a recent study conducted by Rockwell Automation in partnership with the Cyentia Institute.
With daily connections between IT and OT networks, most industrial environments’ equipment is increasingly exposed to sophisticated attacks.
For the writers of the report, it is incumbent upon every industrial company to implement a robust OT/ICS security program to maintain the security and availability of its operations.
We spoke with Bruno Lignon and Pierre Paterni, Rockwell Automation’s experts on cybersecurity to discuss the key findings of the study and how Rockwell Automation manages to reconcile the worlds of OT and IT to strengthen cybersecurity and ensure industrial system continuity and availability.
The number of OT/ICS cybersecurity incidents in the last three years exceeds the total number of reported incidents between 1991 and 2000.
Threat actors primarily focus on the energy sector (39% of attacks), which is three times more than the next most frequently targeted sectors, critical manufacturing (11%) and transportation (10%).
Phishing remains the most popular attack technique (34%), highlighting the importance of cybersecurity tactics such as segmentation, physical isolation (air gapping), “zero trust” access, and security awareness training to minimize risks.
In over half of OT/ICS incidents, supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) systems are targeted (53%), followed by industrial programmable logic controllers (PLCs) (22%).
Over 80% of threat actors come from external organizations; however, “insiders” unwittingly play a role in opening the door to threat actors in about one-third of incidents.
Link: https://emag.directindustry.com/2023/10/09/cybersecurity-securing-the-industrial-world-is-not-the-same-as-securing-the-corporate-world/