CYBER Insights 2026 argues that Industrial Control Systems were designed for reliability and safety in peacetime but now operate in a continuous war zone, forcing organisations to pursue resilience, visibility and modern security strategies. The piece notes that ICS are targeted by both nation-states and criminals, with threats compounded by downtime pressures that make patching difficult and by legacy devices that lack robust authentication and segmentation.
It cites projections such as more than a third of global energy and utilities infrastructure experiencing cyber pre-positioning activity by 2026, and highlights that 12% of OT devices are expected to carry known exploitable vulnerabilities with 7% linked to ransomware campaigns. The article also discusses AI-enabled security, zero-trust adoption for OT, and the need for a detailed inventory and workforce upskilling to sustain improvements as systems gradually modernise.
It stresses that resilience must coexist with aging hardware, favouring compensating controls, micro-segmentation and context-rich CTEM over blanket patching. According to SecurityWeek.