All news with #ot security tag

CISA, FBI Warn: Protect Critical Infrastructure Now

🚨 CISA, the FBI, NSA, DOE, EPA, DOD’s DC3, and international partners issued a joint advisory alerting operators that pro‑Russia hacktivist groups are conducting opportunistic, low‑sophistication attacks against U.S. and global critical infrastructure. These actors exploit internet‑facing OT components (notably VNC and SCADA) and sometimes combine intrusions with DDoS. The advisory urges immediate mitigations: reduce OT exposure, improve asset management, and enforce robust authentication.

AI Creates New Security Risks for OT Networks, Warn Agencies

⚠️ CISA and international partner agencies have issued guidance warning that integrating AI into operational technology (OT) for critical infrastructure can introduce new security and safety risks. The guidance highlights threats such as prompt injection, data poisoning, data collection issues, AI drift and hallucinations, as well as human de‑skilling and cognitive overload. It urges adoption of secure design principles, cautious deployment, operator education and consideration of in‑house development to retain long‑term control.

SANS ICS/OT Security 2025: Key Findings and Actions

🔐 The SANS State of ICS/OT Security 2025 report, sponsored by Fortinet, highlights persistent operational risks across critical infrastructure, with high incident rates, extended remediation times, and remote-access exposures. It calls for treating mean time to recovery (MTTR) as a board-level metric, unifying IT/OT visibility, and automating response playbooks. The analysis urges replacing ad hoc remote connectivity with secure, monitored access and integrating OT-specific threat intelligence into enforcement; FortiPAM and FortiGuard AI-Powered Security Services are cited as solutions to improve segmentation, detection, and recovery.

Energy Sector Targeted by Hackers: Risks, AI & Cooperation

🔒 The energy sector faces a high and growing cyber threat, with attackers targeting OT systems, grid sensors and IoT endpoints to create cascading societal impacts. Critical vulnerabilities — notably in Siemens products — and increasing IT‑OT coupling widen the attack surface. The article stresses the need for end-to-end visibility, AI-driven early warning and anomaly detection, and stronger international cooperation, including NIS 2-aligned practices and active CERT coordination to build resilience.

Fortinet Wins Red Dot Award for FortiGate Rugged Series

🏆Fortinet’s FortiGate Rugged series (FGR-50G-5G and FGR-70G-5G) earned the Red Dot Product Design Award for its fanless industrial design, integrated 5G, and purpose-built ASIC performance. Engineered for OT and critical infrastructure, the appliances combine thermal resilience, shock and moisture protection, and low-latency security functions including next-generation firewalling, SD-WAN, VPN, and AI-driven threat detection. The recognition underscores Fortinet’s focus on precision engineering and durable, field-ready security.

Seven Nations Publish Unified OT Security Guidance

🛡️ National cybersecurity agencies from seven countries released unified operational technology (OT) security guidance on 29 September, aimed at practitioners who deploy or operate OT equipment and systems. The document is organised around five core principles and supplies step-by-step actions for OT security teams to strengthen resilience. It emphasises creating and maintaining a definitive record that covers asset classification, connectivity mapping, system architecture and third-party risks.

Smart Cities Face Growing Cybersecurity Risks and Gaps

🏙️ Smart cities are expanding rapidly—69% of municipalities report strategic agendas and an estimated 83,000 sensors were deployed in 2024—significantly enlarging the attack surface. High-profile incidents (Dallas alarm hack, Washington, DC ransomware, Florida water-treatment manipulation, and Olsztyn transport disruption) show that networked devices can lead to both digital and physical harm. Experts from Accenture, Zebra Technologies, and S2GRUPO warn that legacy devices, fragmented governance, and IT/OT convergence demand zero-trust, segmentation, and coordinated incident response to reduce systemic risk.

Open-Source OT Security: Cost-Effective Industrial Defense

🔒 Open-source tools can provide a cost-effective, flexible foundation for operational technology (OT) security in industrial environments. By combining passive asset discovery, protocol-aware inspection, IDS/IPS, centralized logging and vulnerability management, organizations can approximate many capabilities of expensive commercial offerings. Recommended components include Malcolm (with Zeek), Security Onion, ELK, Wazuh and OpenVAS, augmented by asset sources like NetBox. Successful deployment requires experienced OT/IT teams or external consultants to configure, tune and maintain the stack, and is not a plug-and-play substitute for vendor support.