Fortinet highlights rise in cyber attacks designed to target SCADA and other Industrial Control Systems

Fortinet has announced the findings of its 2019 Operational Technology Security Trends Report, analysing 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.