Modern industrial and critical infrastructures, such as those found in the manufacturing, energy, water and mining sectors, leverage both information technology (IT) and operational technology (OT) to operate. Digital transformation initiatives, proliferation of I-IoT, and increased use of cloud services to store data and execute workloads, dramatically expand the attack surfaces of industrial and critical infrastructures, increasing the importance of focusing on critical infrastructure cybersecurity. The United States National Security Agency (NSA) discovered over a million vulnerabilities in just the industrial base that supplies the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) (1). The erosion of traditional IT-OT segregation has created a multitude of new attack vectors that threat actors are exploiting.
Today, the leading critical infrastructure cybersecurity challenge is what Sygnia calls “industrial grade ransomware” attacks on the IT layers of industrial and critical infrastructures that put the target organization’s operational technologies at risk. The US Department of Homeland Security reported that in 2023, 40% of ransomware attacks in the United States targeted organizations in critical infrastructure sectors(2). The European Union Agency for Cybersecurity (ENISA) reported that in 2023 that 22% of ransomware attacks were targeted at industrial and critical infrastructures, with the majority of those being directed at manufacturing facilities.
40% of Ransomware Attacks in the US Targeted Critical Infrastructure
22% of Ransomware Attacks in the EU Targeted Manufacturing
Critical infrastructure cybersecurity threats include supply chain attacks, espionage, and destructive attacks intended to disrupt operations and cause maximum damage. An increasing percentage of attacks on critical infrastructures are perpetrated by nation-state threat actors (2). Adequate protection against these threats requires comprehensive industrial cyber security solutions.
