Fortinet Operational Technology Security Trends Report

Fortinet announced the findings of its 2019 Operational Technology Security Trends Report, analyzing data gathered from millions of Fortinet devices to discern the state of cybersecurity for supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) and other industrial control systems (ICS). The analysis found many attacks on OT systems that seems to target older devices running unpatched software, indicating that OT networks are increasingly being targeted by IT-based legacy attacks that are no longer effective against IT networks. The report also highlights a rise in purpose-built OT attacks designed to target SCADA and ICS systems.

The majority of these attacks tend to target the weakest parts of OT networks often taking advantage of the complexities caused by a lack of protocol standardization and a sort of implicit trust that seems to permeate many OT environments. This trend is not limited to specific sectors as threat actors targeting OT environments did not discriminate according to industry or geography, as every vertical and region saw a significant rise in attacks.