IT/OT Vulnerability, We’ve Been Hearing All About It, But What Does It Mean?
You start your day as you normally would, reaching for your cell phone complete your morning routine. Maybe you check your bank account, the weather, the score from last night’s game. You do all of these things through apps that don’t function within a uniform operating system and allow for the security of password protection, ensuring firmware and protocols are up to date, or facial recognition. You may have to utilize different browsers because your banking website doesn’t function optimally with your default. What happens if the browser you used or sites you visited aren’t protected? You’ve just opened yourself up for and become vulnerable to malware or ransomware attacks, which could have negative financial and personal repercussions. Your phone itself could be an old model that is no longer supported by the manufacturer, preventing new security patches to be released for it while external threats continue to evolve. Now, imagine this on a large scale within a production or manufacturing facility managing numerous disparate systems, some may be on the local or secured network, some may not be. You can’t see at scale what may or may not be performing optimally, what’s nearing end of life or what may potentially be corrupted without physically walking or auditing your site every time you need this information. This not only impacts your facility, but employees, clients and potentially shareholders. What if there was something you could do? A way to proactively evaluate, align, and remediate potential threats, out of date protocols, and aging hardware. That is what an IT/OT Vulnerability Assessment makes possible. What Exactly is an IT/OT Vulnerability Assessment? Before you start, it’s important to have an intimate understanding and familiarity with your facility that will help in contextualizing the purpose behind an IT/OT Vulnerability Assessment. The IT, … Continued
