Privileged Access Management for OT: Securing ICS Systems That Can't Go Down
OT Systems Cannot Afford Downtime
When an IT system is breached, data is compromised. When an operational technology (OT) system is breached, a pipeline stops; a substation goes dark, or a water treatment plant fails. The consequences are physical, not just financial.
For decades, industrial environments relied on isolation for protection. If a network wasn't connected to anything, there would be little to attack. That assumption no longer holds.
Remote vendor support, IT/OT convergence, distributed sites, and a growing population of contractors have opened many paths into industrial networks. At the center of nearly every serious OT incident sits the same ingredient: privileged access.
The numbers show what is at stake:
- $2.3M: the estimated hourly cost of unplanned industrial downtime (As stated by Acronis)
- 41%: the share of ransomware attacks that start through third-party access (As stated by Security Scorecard)
- 96 days: the average time to...
Copyright of this story solely belongs to hackernoon.com. To see the full text click HERE
