Skybox Security Report Highlights OT Risk
A report issued by Skybox Security entitled Vulnerability and Threat Trends Report covers the security trends that have affected cybersecurity management over the last year. Researchers from Skybox Research Lab compiled the report taking into account the threats, exploits, and vulnerabilities that came to light in the previous twelve months. The aim is to help companies align their security plan to cope with current and emerging threats. The report allows cybersecurity teams to familiarize themselves with the standard operating procedure of the most common issues that may crop up in an enterprise setting. It also offers insights into how the industry has dealt with these threats over the last year.
Insights Garnered from the Report
The report noted several elements based on the study of the last year’s security reports. When compared to the figures from 2018, Microsoft operating systems saw a leap in vulnerabilities of 66%. However, malicious users seemed to be drifting away from the use of crypto miners as malware as diminished by almost 50% over the last year. The report found the backdoor samples also went up by a factor of four, suggesting that companies reconsider their security protocols. One of the more critical pieces of insight the report generated was the amount of OT advisories that were issued through 2019. The volume of OT risk rose by 50% and heralds a dangerous move towards attacking OT assets.
Skybox Security’s VP of R&D and CTO Ron Davidson noted that there is a greater need for protections in OT networks, especially since OT and IT are so closely linked. As companies start leveraging more internet-connected devices, the potential for using OT assets to facilitate a network breach becomes more of a real concern. IT teams need to discover ways to passively locate these vulnerabilities and deal with them before malicious users have the chance to exploit them.
