A report commissioned by cloud safety firm Barracuda discovered that 94% of respondents have skilled some type of assault on their industrial IoT (IIoT) or operational know-how (OT) methods over the past 12 months.
The State of Industrial Safety in 2022 report surveyed 800 senior IT and safety officers chargeable for these industrial methods.
“Within the present risk panorama, essential infrastructure is a horny goal for cybercriminals, however sadly IIoT/OT safety tasks usually take a backseat to different safety initiatives or fail as a result of value or complexity, leaving organizations in danger,” mentioned Tim Jefferson, senior vice chairman for knowledge safety, community, and software safety at Barracuda mentioned in a press release accompanying the report.
Geopolitical stress on the rise
Latest assaults comparable to these focused by the SolarWinds assault, and the Russian DDoS assault on Lithuania final month, have raised issues over nation state-backed assaults on industrial methods. Because of this, the survey discovered that 89% of the respondents are very or pretty involved in regards to the present geopolitical scenario.
Constellation Analysis analyst Liz Miller acknowledged that “the Russian invasion of Ukraine set the world on excessive alert because it anticipated vulnerabilities in IIoT gadgets turning into prime targets ought to the battle enter the our on-line world.”
Manufacturing and healthcare industries lag behind
The report famous that 93% of respondents admitted that their group had failed of their IIoT/OT safety tasks, with a scarcity of expertise and instruments usually blamed. Moreover, solely 18% of firms surveyed limit community entry and implement multifactor authentication (MFA), leaving networks open to assaults.
Round half of respondents consider that their group can deal with making use of safety updates themselves, leaving many needing exterior assist. The report notes that the worst hit organizations are typically people who depend on guide updates and don’t have entry to automation instruments.
Manufacturing and healthcare have been recognized because the least ready industries, with solely 24% and 17% respectively in a position to full their safety tasks.
“Healthcare has been put by the wringer these previous two years with the worldwide pandemic making medical infrastructure and significant methods ripe targets for attackers,” Miller mentioned. “Most healthcare CISOs and CIOs I communicate with are exhausted and are pushing by with budgets that appear massive however aren’t what they should speed up tasks and are going through expertise shortages to take care of networks, not to mention advance tasks.”
Copyright © 2022 IDG Communications, Inc.
