Critical Infrastructure Security

Importance, risk of industrial secure remote access recognized

Many industrial organizations have noted the importance of industrial secure remote access, most particularly for third-party access, followed by productivity gains, data collection, and cost reductions, according to SecurityWeek. Different sectors had varying priorities for I-SRA use, with 83% of oil and gas entities focusing on third-party access and 72% of manufacturing organizations focusing on data collection efforts, a report from Cyolo showed. However, organizations across all industries were found to have a higher level of concern regarding remote access risks than confidence in their existing I-SRA systems. Operational technology threats were cited as the biggest risk, followed by advanced persistent threats, misconfigurations, and malware. "Simply put, teams allow remote access to their critical systems because operations depend on it but that access is far less secure than they'd like," said Cyolo. The findings also showed that industrial organizations have already been adopting defense-in-depth measures, network segmentation, multi-factor authentication, and identity access management to combat threats.

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