Page 86 - Cyber Defense eMagazine July 2024

Cyber-Informed Engineering – A New Perspective on OT

Security

By Andrew Ginter, VP Industrial Security, Waterfall Security Solutions

Cyber-Informed Engineering (CIE) is a new perspective on OT cyber risk – one that is being embraced
by OT/engineering teams and IT/enterprise cybersecurity teams alike. This kind of consensus among IT
and OT teams is unprecedented in the twenty-year history of the OT security field.

Threats

The OT threat environment continues to worsen, which means we have an increasingly pressing need to
engage IT and OT teams in addressing material cyber risks to physical operations. In particular, in 2023,
68 cyber-attacks shut down, damaged, or otherwise physically impacted over 500 operational technology
(OT) sites, according to the latest Waterfall / ICSStrive 2024 Threat Report. The rate of this class of attack
was mostly “flat” between 2010 and 2019, with zero to five attacks in the public record every year for
manufacturing and heavy industry. Since the turn of the decade, the number of these attacks has roughly
doubled annually, compounded. The problem of OT security has changed, from a “theoretical” problem,
to one that is real and growing exponentially.

Cyber Defense eMagazine – July 2024 Edition 86
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