The industrial sector has undergone a significant digital transformation in the past decade, with critical infrastructure sectors witnessing sweeping changes in supply chain management, energy management, and remote monitoring. The convergence of IT and OT systems, the rise of IoT assets, and the transition to cloud environments have unlocked many opportunities and introduced new cybersecurity challenges, including increased manual work for security teams.
The industry increasingly relies on digital technologies amid the fourth industrial revolution, but security teams are struggling to keep pace with the rapidly evolving threat landscape. Internal organizational failures, technical deficiencies, and other factors create blind spots that leave organizations vulnerable. This threat is exacerbated by the critical importance of their systems and infrastructure, making them frequent targets of sophisticated cyberattacks.
Recent Breaches Expose a Growing Threat
Cyber threats increasingly target industrial systems, and the consequences of security breaches can be catastrophic, ranging from physical harm to production downtime and environmental damage. Their far-reaching impacts extend beyond the company itself to disrupt product and service offerings and customers and business partners.
Manufacturing has seen a staggering 107 percent increase in cyberattacks since 2021, according to Dragos. Recent breaches, such as the attack on Johnson Controls, a manufacturer of industrial control systems, security systems and HVAC equipment, has proven to be especially harmful due to its contract work for several U.S. federal agencies.
Instances like the Johnson Controls cyberattack can compromise sensitive information and cause disruptions that can affect the supply chain for months. Clorox experienced this firsthand in August 2023 when it suffered a cyberattack that significantly disrupted production. As a result, Clorox reported it has already spent $25 million responding to the cyberattack, and quarterly sales dropped over 20 percent.
When it comes to cybersecurity, visibility is vital. Without it, you cannot know what’s happening in your network or how effective your security controls are. Manual processes create blind spots and make it impossible to provide real-time monitoring and detection capabilities for cyber threats. Cybersecurity visibility is essential for protecting an organization’s network and assets. Without it, the security team cannot identify vulnerabilities, detect threats, or respond to incidents effectively.
Traditional manual processes are inefficient and error-prone, leading to blind spots and delayed response times.
Security automation can help bridge these gaps and mitigate risks by reducing the need for manual intervention and context switching in threat detection and incident response, especially when powered by low-code capabilities. This enables OT security teams to proactively patch assets and monitor threats by automating tasks such as device quarantine, isolation, tagging and decoy deployment.
The right security automation tool will be able to seamlessly integrate with the existing industrial control systems (ICS) and supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) systems, bolstering security measures without necessitating a complete infrastructure overhaul.
Looking Ahead
The cybersecurity skills gap will continue to present a significant obstacle to many industries, especially for organizations operating in environments that combine OT and IT, as this demands a unique and specialized skill set.
While security automation will never remove the need for people, it does make their lives easier by automating repetitive, time-consuming tasks without requiring heavy coding from the user. Using this tool as part of a proactive security approach can boost efficiency, cut costs, and let security leaders focus on strategic decisions and employee well-being, all while improving security posture.
