Fortinet®, a global leader in broad, integrated, and automated cybersecurity solutions, today released its global 2022 State of Operational Technology and Cybersecurity Report. While industrial control environments continue to be a target for cyber criminals – with global: 93% (Indonesia: 90%) of Operational Technology (OT) organizations experiencing an intrusion in the past 12 months – the report uncovered widespread gaps in industrial security and indicated opportunities for improvements. Key findings of the report include:
- OT activities lack centralized visibility, increasing security risks. The global Fortinet report found that only 13% (Indonesia: 26%) of respondents have achieved centralized visibility of all OT activities. Additionally, only 52% of organizations are able to track all OT activities from the security operations center (SOC). At the same time, 97% of global organizations consider OT a moderate or significant factor in their overall security risk. The report findings indicate that the lack of centralized visibility contributes to organizations’ OT security risks and weakened security posture.
- OT security intrusions significantly impact organizations’ productivity and their bottom line. The Fortinet report found that 93% (Indonesia: 90%) of OT organizations experienced at least one intrusion in the past 12 months. The top 3 intrusion types of Indonesian organizations experienced were phishing email, malware and ransomware. As a result of these intrusions, nearly 50% (Indonesia: 90%) of organizations suffered an operation outage that affected productivity with 90% of intrusions requiring hours or longer to restore service while 83% of Indonesian OT organizations took up to a few hours to return to service and the rest of 12% took days, weeks, months, Additionally, one-third of global respondents saw revenue, data loss, compliance and brand-value impacted as a result of security intrusions.
- Ownership of OT security is not consistent across organizations. According to the Fortinet report, OT security management falls within a range of primarily director or manager roles, ranging from the Director of Plant Operations to Manager of Manufacturing Operations. Only 15% (Indonesia: 10%) of survey respondents say that the CISO holds the responsibility for OT security at their organization.
- OT security is gradually improving, but security gaps still exist in many organizations. When asked about the maturity of their organization’s OT security posture, only 21% of organizations have reached level 4, which includes leveraging orchestration and management. Notably, a larger proportion of Latin America and APAC respondents have reached level 4 compared to other regions. The report found that a vast majority of organizations use between two and eight different vendors for their industrial devices and have between 100 and 10,000 devices in operation, adding complexity. For Indonesia, the report found that 12% of Indonesian OT organizations have between 1,000 – 10,000 IP-enabled OT devices in operations. Local organizations face challenges with using multiple OT security tools, further creating gaps in their security posture.
OT Security is a Corporate-Level Concern
As OT systems increasingly become targets for cyber criminals, C-level leaders recognize the importance of securing these environments to mitigate risks to their organizations. Industrial systems have become a significant risk factor since these environments were traditionally air-gapped from IT and corporate networks, but now these two infrastructures are becoming universally integrated. With industrial systems now being connected to the internet and more accessible from anywhere, organizations’ attack surface is increasing significantly.
With the IT threat landscape becoming more sophisticated, connected OT systems have also become vulnerable to these growing threats. This combination of factors is moving industrial security upward in many organizations’ risk portfolio. OT security is a growing concern for executive leaders, increasing the need for organizations to move toward full protection of their industrial control system (ICS) and supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) systems.
According to Edwin Lim, Country Director, Fortinet Indonesia, as Indonesia accelerates its efforts to transform the manufacturing sector and to achieve its Making Indonesia 4.0 goals, Fortinet’s study on Indonesia’s operational technology (OT) sector sheds light on what needs to be done to address the current security gaps.
“Our study found that 9 out of 10 OT organizations surveyed in Indonesia suffered an impact on operations in the industrial environment due to cyber intrusions. 63 percent of Indonesian OT organizations also suffered operational outages that affected productivity and lost business-critical data (57 percent) while 60 percent of organizations have a high level of concern regarding ransomware in OT environments, as compared to other intrusions,” he said.
With the rise of data breaches in the country, local organizations in Indonesian recognize that cybersecurity is a serious boardroom issue, with the CEO as the top influencer of cybersecurity decisions. There is an urgent need for both IT and OT teams in the organization to work together holistically to enhance the central visibility of their cybersecurity operations which ultimately enhances the protection their organizations.
