OT Security, In Practice: 4 Cross‑Industry Trends from Global Assessments and How CISOs Should Respond

OT incidents rarely start with "OT attacks." They start with ordinary enterprise weaknesses: shared credentials, remote access shortcuts, management systems that bridge zones too easily, and monitoring that stops short of operations.

When those weaknesses line up, an initial IT compromise becomes an OT event, and the deciding factor is no longer whether the activity is detected, but whether the environment can be contained and recovered without extended outage. What matters is that these failure patterns repeat across industries, which means they can be anticipated and solved - but only if recovery is treated as a security control, not an afterthought.

Recurring OT Security Patterns Across Industries

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Across numerous OT security assessments, adversary simulations, and incident response engagements conducted globally between 2022 and 2025, one thing became clear: OT risk does not distribute evenly across the environment. It concentrates. A small number of control points, such as remote access, management infrastructure, identity boundaries, monitoring coverage, and recovery systems, repeatedly determined whether incidents stayed contained or escalated into operational disruption.

Attackers did not need deep process knowledge to cause impact either, as access paths built for administration and support provided a reliable entry. Weak separation between IT and OT enabled lateral movement. Limited visibility in operational zones delayed response. While recovery mechanisms existed, they often failed the moment they were needed most.

These issues were observed across oil and gas, energy and petrochemicals, transportation, renewables, metals and mining, marine and energy engineering, and aviation services, despite significant differences in technologies and threat models.

Core OT Defences Improved — IT–OT Traffic Still Undermines Them

Roughly one-third of assessed environments showed solid progress in core OT defences, including disciplined remote-management designs and a hardened Production DMZ.

This maturity was frequently offset by overly permissive traffic flows between IT and OT. In multiple environments with otherwise sound segmentation, these allowances became the primary escalation path once initial access was established, limiting the practical value of the PDMZ (Production Demilitarized Zone) during incidents.

Backups Were Common — Recovery Was Not

OT backup implementations were generally comprehensive, covering data, configurations, snapshots, and machine state.

In practice, recoverability remained weak. In approximately 50% of assessments, OT backup platforms were reachable from IT or management tiers or lacked offline or immutable copies. Around 50% also showed no evidence of a tested OT recovery process. In destructive ransomware scenarios, this left organisations exposed despite having backups in place.

Management and Remote Access Were the Primary OT Ingress

In roughly 60% of adversary simulations, access to OT was achieved through management infrastructure, most commonly jump servers.

These systems were rarely compromised through exploitation; misconfiguration, excessive trust, and inherited privileges allowed attackers to move into OT via legitimate access paths, consistent with living-off-the-land techniques observed in real incidents.

Detection Worked Where Deployed — Blind Spots Persisted Elsewhere

More than 50% of assessed environments had limited or no SIEM or SOC telemetry in OT or management zones.

By contrast, around 30% demonstrated mature detection capabilities, successfully identifying simulated attacker activity, particularly within operations centres. Where coverage stopped at IT boundaries, attacker activity went unseen once it moved into operational layers, increasing dwell time and delaying containment.

Identity and Tiering Weaknesses Accelerated Lateral Movement

In approximately 60% of engagements, identity-related issues were present, including credential reuse across IT and OT, non-rotated credentials, oversized administrative groups, or missing MFA.

These conditions significantly increased the likelihood that an IT-originating compromise would escalate into an OT outage, extending dwell time, raising recovery costs, and increasing regulatory exposure.

Third-Party Access Remained a Consistent Risk

In roughly 40% of cases, vendor laptops or site-to-site tunnels provided the easiest path into OT environments.

Third-party access was often weakly monitored or insufficiently controlled, creating trusted pathways that bypassed internal safeguards and reduced visibility during incidents.

Cross-Industry Trends and Their Operational Impact

Management and Remote-Access Planes Are the Primary OT Ingress

In most environments, adversaries did not target OT by breaking through the process network. They entered through administrative paths already trusted by the environment: VPNs, jump hosts, remote engineering access, and management tooling. These paths were frequently enabled by credential reuse, weak authentication, or broad administrative privileges.

The implication is that OT risk concentrates upstream of the process network. Once management planes are compromised, segmentation offers limited protection. For incident response teams, this means containment often depends on how quickly management access can be restricted, rather than on controls deeper in the process network.

Detection Works Where Deployed; Blind Spots Persist Elsewhere

Where SIEM and SOC coverage extended to OT-adjacent systems, simulated attacker activity was detected reliably, particularly on the IT side. In contrast, visibility often dropped sharply once activity crossed into operational or management zones.

Environments that combined event logging, endpoint protection, and SIEM-integrated network detection across both IT and OT showed materially stronger detection outcomes. Where those signals were absent, attacks were not missed - they were simply never observable. The implication is that detection maturity is uneven by design, and blind spots at IT–OT boundaries continue to delay containment and increase dwell time.

Recovery Must Be Tamper-Resistant, Not Just Present

Backups were common across environments, but recoverability was not. Online-only backup systems and untested disaster recovery plans remained vulnerable to the same access paths used during an attack.

Without immutable or offline copies and rehearsed restoration procedures, recovery timelines extended significantly during destructive events. In OT incident response, recovery capability determines whether an organisation returns to operation on its own terms or remains constrained by the attacker's impact.

Identity and Tiering Hygiene Shapes Blast Radius

Identity failures consistently amplified incident impact. Credential reuse across IT and OT, non-rotated service accounts, oversized administrative groups, and weak privilege separation allowed attackers to move laterally without resistance once initial access was achieved.

In these conditions, network controls slowed movement but rarely stopped it. During incident response, poor identity hygiene translates directly into a wider blast radius, longer outages, and higher business impact.

What CISOs Should Do Next: Strategy and Roadmap

Lock down management and remote access.

Treat management and remote-access planes as the primary OT attack surface. Standardise jump servers and OT-dedicated remote access, enforce MFA everywhere, and remove shared or persistent access. Vendor sessions should be per-person, time-bound, and recorded. Anything else expands the blast radius by design.

Extend visibility across escalation paths.

Detection must follow how attackers move, not how networks are drawn. Forward logs from VPNs, firewalls, jump hosts, identity systems, and backup platforms to the SOC. Add host and identity telemetry where OT visibility drops off. If activity disappears at the IT–OT boundary, incident response stalls.

Make recovery verifiable.

Assume attackers can reach IT and management tiers. Backups must be immutable or offline, administered under split roles, and tested regularly. Quarterly restores of critical OT services to defined RTO/RPO are non-negotiable. If recovery can't be proven, it can't be relied on.

Use identity to limit blast radius.

Rotate privileged and service credentials, shrink admin groups, and enforce MFA for all privileged and remote access. Tighten trust relationships between IT and OT domains. Weak identity controls consistently negate otherwise sound segmentation.

Operationalise governance and metrics.

Define shared ownership across security, OT, and vendors. Track what actually matters: detection coverage by zone, dwell time, recovery time, and privileged access sprawl. If it can't be measured, it won't improve.

Conclusion

OT incidents rarely begin with sophisticated attacks on process networks. They start with ordinary enterprise weaknesses: shared credentials, permissive remote access, trusted management paths, and blind spots between IT and OT.

What determines the outcome isn't whether attackers get in — it's whether organisations can contain and recover when they do.

From years of OT assessments and incident response engagements, a consistent pattern emerges. The environments that limit operational impact are not those with the most tools, but those that make deliberate architectural choices, including:

• Management access is tightly governed
• Identity boundaries are enforced, not assumed
• Detection follows attacker movement across zones
• Recovery works even after IT and management layers are compromised

Where these foundations are weak, segmentation and controls only slow incidents — they don't stop escalation. Where they are strong, organisations retain control under pressure.

For CISOs, the shift is clear: OT security strategies must be designed around containment and recovery, not just hardening and prevention. Resilience in OT environments isn't something incident response creates in the moment. Rather, resilience is the result of architectural decisions made long before the incident begins.

Watch our on-demand webinar to explore proven detection strategies drawn from real OT incident response cases and learn how to strengthen security in complex environments.

About the author: Dotan Shemer is a Cyber Security Consulting Manager at Sygnia, where he leads and delivers cybersecurity consulting engagements and helps customers enhance their security resilience worldwide. Previously, he served as a Security Program Manager at Playtech, where he established and managed a PMO function supporting multiple security groups and oversaw a broad portfolio of security projects. Earlier in his career, Dotan held security and project management roles at Netcracker Technology, Amdocs, and ZoneTV, building delivery frameworks and managing complex, cross-functional programs. With a strong focus on execution, stakeholder alignment, and measurable outcomes, he is passionate about helping organizations strengthen their security posture and resilience.