Intelligent CIO North America Issue 35 | Page 21

LATEST INTELLIGENCE
Today ’ s advances in technology have put these devices online and thus they have become a vector for security threats . Furthermore , controllers were not built to address the security threats or the quite innocent human errors we now experience . Outsiders , insiders and outsiders masquerading as insiders are all possible actors that launch sophisticated attacks to take over machines for nefarious purposes . More recently hackers are no longer rogue individuals but are often a carefully curated and systematic program by well-funded and highly motivated organizations and countries . A carefully executed attack can accomplish as much if not more than modern day warfare .
Few argue that the attack surface has changed to encompass both IT and OT . Because these two different worlds are now connected , an attack that starts on an IT environment can quickly move to an OT environment and vice versa . Lateral movement is almost the preferred attack methodology amongst hackers because of the relative ease of finding a weak link in the system , leveraging it as the point of entry , and then quickly owning the entire network . p
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