Fortinet Releases '2025 Global OT Cybersecurity Status Report'

[Financial News] Fortinet Korea announced the release of the '2025 Manufacturing Operations Technology (OT) and Cybersecurity Status Report' on the 14th.
This report is based on a survey of over 550 OT security managers worldwide and presents strategies for organizations to enhance their security capabilities.
According to the Fortinet report, the trend of transferring OT security responsibility to Chief Information Security Officers (CISO) or similar C-level executives is clearly increasing worldwide. 52% of all respondents stated that CISO or CSO is responsible for OT security, marking a significant increase compared to 16% in 2022. Overall, 95% of C-level executives were responsible for OT security. The response that they plan to transfer OT security under the CISO within the next 12 months also increased from 60% last year to 80%.
Organizations with higher security maturity tend to have better incident response capabilities and less actual damage. Organizations with higher security maturity tend to respond more effectively to low-skilled attacks like phishing or have a lower frequency of attacks. On the other hand, advanced threats such as APT (Advanced Persistent Threat) or OT-specific malware are difficult to detect, and organizations with low security maturity may not even be aware of the existence of such threats.
Organizations that have adopted basic best practices such as complying with basic security rules, strengthening education, and applying threat intelligence have seen a significant reduction in major incidents such as business email account hijacking. Additionally, the proportion of organizations applying threat intelligence increased from 31% last year to 49%.
The trend of 'vendor consolidation', which reduces the number of OT device vendors, is accelerating. This shows that the security maturity and operational efficiency of organizations are improving, with 78% of all organizations using only 1 to 4 vendors. In particular, customers who have adopted Fortinet's OT security platform have improved visibility and reduced cyber risks by integrating security and network in remote OT environments, resulting in a 93% reduction in cyber incident rates compared to a flat network environment.
This report suggests security strategies to strengthen organizational security capabilities, such as securing visibility and supplementary control over OT assets to protect vulnerable assets, network segmentation to prevent breach propagation, establishing security operations (SecOps) and incident response plans for IT-OT integrated response, adopting an integrated security platform to simplify complex security environments, and utilizing OT-specific threat intelligence to respond in real-time to the latest OT threats.
Nirav Shah, Senior Vice President of Products and Solutions at Fortinet, said, "Organizations that prioritize OT security tend to see a clear reduction in breach impact," adding, "To protect sensitive OT systems, resources must be actively invested from management to field personnel."

psh@fnnews.com Park Seong-hyun Reporter