How AI can help close IoT’s growing security gaps to contain ransomware

Nation-state attackers are fine-tuning their tradecraft to take advantage of unprotected IoT sensors essential to infrastructure and manufacturing and increasing their attacks against U.S. and European targets. Once-sporadic attacks have given way to an all-out assault on infrastructure and production plants.  

IoT attacks seek to take advantage of infrastructure and manufacturing organizations that don’t know how many sensors and endpoints they have, where they are, if they’re current on patches or if they’re secured. IT and security teams in a typical enterprise don’t know where up to 40% of their endpoints are. During Q2 2023, 70% of all ransomware attacks were aimed at the manufacturing sector, followed by industrial control systems (ICS) equipment and engineering (16%).

Unprotected gaps between operational technology (OT) and IT systems, along with unprotected ICS’, are soft targets. This past year, 75% of OT organizations experienced at least one breach intrusion.

More AI-based, tightly orchestrated cyberattacks coming

Well-funded nation-state attackers and criminal gangs are also recruiting AI and machine learning (ML) experts to help build the next generation of generative AI attack tools. Threat actors are orchestrating their IoT attacks with social engineering and reconnaissance and often know more about a target’s network than the admins do.  

Manufacturing CISOs seeing spikes in nation-state attack attempts say that new tradecraft reflects a faster, more efficient attack strategy often combined with deepfakes and advanced social engineering. Cyberattacks reflect a new generation of technologies capable of adapting faster than any infrastructure or…