Claroty recently published its yearly The Global State of Industrial Cybersecurity report in which 1,000 IT & OT security respondents from the US, UK, Germany, France, and Australia answered a series of questions regarding the current safety of industrial networks.
Security in critical infrastructure has become a highly topical issue, with NotPetya highlighting the ease and scope for attack within industrial networks. President Trump recently declared a national emergency to protect against cyber attacks on the national power grid, with the U.S. Secretary of Energy, Dan Brouillette stating the “Executive Order will greatly diminish the ability of foreign adversaries to target our critical electric infrastructure.”
However, a worrying 51% of US respondents believe that industrial networks are still not adequately safeguarded, with 54% stating that the US’ critical infrastructure is vulnerable to cyber attack. In fact, according to Claroty’s survey, 67.2% of US respondents believe that an attack on critical infrastructure would be more damaging that an enterprise data breach.
Attacks on critical infrastructure remain of high concern to intelligence and security organizations worldwide, with the US Department of Homeland Security astutely aware of the risk of state-sponsored attacks. As the report states, the U.S. Cyber Command has openly stated that “adversaries direct continuous operations and activities against our allies and us in campaigns short of open warfare to achieve competitive advantage and impair U.S. interests.”
Primary Areas of Concern
The report also asked its participants to detail what types of cyber attack they believe to be most prevalent going into 2020. For U.S. respondents, hacking/unauthorized network access had an overwhelming majority (56%) relative to Ransomware (21.4%), Sabotage (11.8%), Other Malware (10%), and other (0.6%).
There was also significant agreement amongst American security professionals that Electric Power remained a key vulnerability amongst critical infrastructure (45.6%). After cyber-attacks on the Ukraine and the subsequent spread of NotPetya, security professionals worldwide have seen how attacks on critical infrastructure can leave organizations and their critical assets paralyzed.
By extension, cyber threats seen from state-sponsored actors have only intensified concerns regarding when a major cyber attack could be seen in North America – a sentiment mirrored in the responses with more than 60% of the belief that one will occur within the next 5 years.
Addressing OT Security
Although the majority of those surveyed recognize the need for further protection against attacks on critical infrastructure, 58.6% of American security professionals believe that IT enterprise security presents more pressure.
Despite this, 70.8% would still rather work in IT enterprise security than industrial cyber security. This draws on the fact that 87% believe that it is the government’s responsibility to ensure critical infrastructure is properly protected.
This interesting point of view is again mirrored in the percentage of respondents asked whether they would prefer to work in an organization that suffers a massive data breach, or one that suffers a major critical infrastructure-related cyber attack – standing at 57.4%.
The report continues, saying “respondents largely agree that a cyberattack on critical infrastructure is potentially more damaging than a massive data breach so perhaps, despite their training, they don’t feel adequately armed to deal with such an attack.”
So How do We Close the IT-OT Security Gap?
- Raise awareness for these types of attacks through sufficient and in-depth training
- Educate on the risk of collateral damage, pointing to gaps in your security infrastructure
- Eliminate complexity by informing those with budgets, ensuring cyber security is considered within budgets
- Align IT & OT teams to identify the most important use cases to implement solutions that are agentless and passive
- Simplify governance by using tools that can be used by both IT and OT teams alike
——
This June, join 100s of cyber security professionals from around the world at CS4CA World, the first 24-hour Virtual Cyber Security conference dedicated to the APAC, MENA, Europe, LatAm, and North American regions. Learn more at world.cs4ca.com and register for your virtual conference pass for FREE!
[source: Claroty]