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1 in 4 industrial firms have experienced a cyber incident in past year

Published on: 16 Jan 2018

Industrial companies have been targeted heavily by hackers, as it has emerged that more than a quarter have faced a variety of cyber attacks recently.

Some 28 per cent of the 962 industrial companies quizzed for Kaspersky Lab’s IT Security Risks Survey faced targeted attacks in the last 12 months.

This marked a rise of eight percentage points on last year’s figure and confirmed Kaspersky’s predictions that specific malware targeting vulnerabilities in industrial automation components would emerge by 2018.

With the most dangerous incident type growing by more than a third, this strongly suggests that cyber criminal groups are paying much closer attention to the industrial sector.

Viruses and malware were the most common cyber security incident weathered by industrial organisations, with half facing these sorts of threats. This was followed by employees misusing IT resources and the physical loss of sensitive mobile devices.

A spokesperson for Kaspersky Lab said that cyber attacks on industrial control systems have become the indisputable number one concern.

They added that this makes it crucially important to implement a highly flexible yet complex security solution that’s specifically designed to protect automated industrial environments and has been configured in accordance with the technological processes of each organisation.