Many senior managers in utilities, transportation, healthcare and manufacturing are unaware of the security risks in industrial systems, according to the European Union Agency for Network and Information Security (Enisa).
Industrial control systems and companies operating Scada (supervisory control and data acquisition) systems are now commonplace, and some of these are highly interconnected with other corporate networks and the internet.
Some devices lack encryption protocols, and there is also a lack of adequate logging, which makes it harder to identify the root cause of security breaches, said Enisa.
Because Scada systems are now interconnected and exposed to the internet, or large public networks, they are now exposed to many more threats, the agency warned.
Enisa’s report comes seven years after the Stuxnet worm demonstrated the devastating consequences of a targeted attack on industrial systems that use Scada, and the 2015 attack on the Ukrainian power grid.
