All news with #ot security tag

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.