When asked why he robbed banks, Depression-era bank robber Willie Sutton purportedly replied, “Because that’s where the money is.” If Sutton had been a modern-day cybercriminal, the corollary would be, “Why do you attack endpoints? Because that’s where humans interact.”
In IT security, the biggest threat vectors are social engineering, credential theft and vulnerability exploits. In OT, there are certainly malicious attacks, but many threats involve inadvertent mistakes by employees or authorized third-party technicians who come and go, often remotely. Plant floors are abuzz with activity as internal and external teams work together to keep processes running smoothly.
Without endpoint security, there’s no way to correlate user activity and events. That is, there’s no way to know who’s plugging in when and what they’re doing until their commands have been executed on the network. That’s too late...read more!
