Trends in Industrial Control Systems Cybersecurity

With connectivity to the outside world growing, cyber attacks on industrial computers constitute an extremely dangerous threat, as these types of incidents can cause material losses and production downtime for a whole system. Moreover, industrial enterprises knocked out of service can seriously undermine a region’s social welfare, ecology and macroeconomics. Not surprisingly, cybersecurity is therefore becoming more and more important across the board.

Given the importance of industrial control systems (ICS) cybersecurity, it is essential to understand the trends that dominate the ICS space. In order to achieve a thorough understanding, we will look at these trends from both the business and the threats perspective.

The Business Perspective

On June 2018, Kaspersky Lab released the second annual report “The State of Industrial Cybersecurity 2018,” a publication which is based on a survey of 320 worldwide professionals with decision-making power regarding ICS cybersecurity. The scope of the survey was to analyze the status quo of industrial cybersecurity.

The analysis of this report reveals some interesting facts about ICS cybersecurity and how this focus area is perceived by ICS businesses.

ICS Cybersecurity Is a Major Priority, but…

As a “headline” finding, one can say that even though over three-quarters of the companies surveyed state that ICS cybersecurity is a major priority, they oftentimes don’t carry out associated security measures.

For instance, despite the fact that over three-quarters of the companies surveyed state that it is very likely or at least quite likely they will become a target of a cybersecurity attack in the ICS space, only 23% are compliant with minimal mandatory industry or government guidance and regulations around cybersecurity of industrial control systems.

Although more than half of the companies (51%) said that they did not experience any incident or breach in the past 12 months, the question is (Read more...)