The digitalization of industrial infrastructure is underway and 69% of organizations in the Middle East are confident that the Internet of Things, as one of its key aspects, will change the state of security in industrial control systems (ICS).
According to Kaspersky’s recent report, ‘The State of Industrial Cybersecurity in the Era of Digitalization’, 20% of organizations have already prioritized IoT-related incidents but solutions effective against IoT threats are yet to become widespread.
Industrial organizations continue to implement digitalization and Industry 4.0 standards. Even despite the market slowdown as a result of the coronavirus pandemic, digitalization is still being adopted. For instance, McKinsey & Company’s recent research revealed that 90% of manufacturing and supply chain professionals plan to invest in talent for digitization. Their research also shows that companies, where such projects had already been introduced, feel more confident during crises.
At the same time, the growing number of digitalization projects, such as industrial IoT, raises awareness of the associated risks. The report showed that today, however, not all organizations may feel ready to face threats to IoT. Thus, only 23% of companies in the Middle East have implemented active network and traffic monitoring, and 23% have introduced network anomaly detection – these solutions allow security teams to track anomalies or malicious activity in IoT systems.
To ensure IoT systems are used effectively and safely, Kaspersky experts provide organizations with the following advice:
- Consider protection at the very beginning of IoT implementation by using dedicated security solutions.
- Assess the status of a device’s security before its implementation. Preferences should be given to devices that have cybersecurity certificates and products from those manufacturers that pay more attention to information security.
- Conduct regular security audits and provide the security team responsible for protecting IoT systems with up-to-date threat intelligence.
- Establish procedures for obtaining information on relevant vulnerabilities in software and applications, and available updates to ensure proper and timely responses to any incidents.
- Implement cybersecurity solutions designed to analyse network traffic and detect anomalies and prevent IoT network attacks, then integrate the analysis into the enterprise network security system.