ICS/OT Vulnerability Management – Claroty Report Highlights Upward Trend of Disclosed ICS Vulnerabilities

Vulnerability management is at the core of every cybersecurity program. While managing vulnerabilities in control system environments is challenging – for a variety of reasons – it is still necessary. To make it even more challenging, if it seems the disclosure of vulnerabilities impacting ICS/OT has been more frequent than usual this year, it has. According to Claroty’s third Biannual ICS Risk & Vulnerability Report, there has been a 41% increase in ICS vulnerabilities disclosed in the first half (1H) of 2021 compared to the previous six months. What’s more concerning, the report highlights most ICS vulnerabilities are classified as high or critical severity, have low attack complexity, are remotely exploitable, and may cause total loss of availability. Furthermore, in the past two months, there have been even more disclosed vulnerabilities impacting control system environments, such as INFRA:HALT (including an update), BadAlloc (Update C), Cisco (including all ISA3000 (Industrial Security Appliance) firewalls), a Code Execution Vulnerability in Siemens SINEMA Remote Connect Client, along with several other ICS-CERT advisories. Access the full report at Claroty.