The recent cyberattacks in the utilities industry are a grim reminder that this sector is a vulnerable target for ransomware. Utility companies provide essential services like electricity, heat, gas, and water. These companies are also responsible for handling sensitive data.
Cyberattacks on municipal utilities can cause:
- Power outages
- Damage to critical infrastructure and essential networks
- Stolen personally identifiable information (PII) resulting in eroded customer trust, damage to brand, and fines
- Billions of dollars lost to ransom demands and repairs
As the utilities sector adopts modern technology to streamline processes, their applications and networks become more interconnected. While the benefits of digital transformation are vast, moving systems and applications to the cloud leaves organizations vulnerable. With increasing interconnectivity between on-premises and cloud environments — between internal and third-party systems — exposure and risk increase. This has only become more apparent in the last two years; utilities companies have seen a 50% increase in cyber incidents from remote working. This industry cannot just rely on compliance regulations and traditional security to remain secure from attackers. While most companies within the utilities space have taken steps to protect their infrastructure, business-critical applications still fall out of the scope of traditional security measures.
Business-critical applications are the enterprise systems essential for business continuity, like ERP, CRM, PLM, HCM, SCM, and BI. IDC research shows that 64% of ERP systems have been breached in the last two years and there have been five US-Cert alerts on malicious activity targeting business-critical applications in the last five years. Protect the crown jewels of your business with a risk-based vulnerability management solution. A risk-based vulnerability management solution reduces exposure across your attack surface by prioritizing remediation based on the level of risk. This goes beyond traditional vulnerability management by helping users understand criticality using “threat intelligence, attacker activity, and internal asset criticality to provide a better view of real organizational risk.”1
Learn more about how Onapsis can help utilities companies with vulnerability management from Oklahoma’s largest electric utility. Join Oklahoma Gas & Electric Company (OGE Energy Corp) to hear how they have approached their security holistically, taking familiar security best practices and implementing them at both the OT & IT level.
Register here for our webinar on November 18, 2021 at 10:30 AM EST.
