86% of OT organisations suffered from cyber intrusions in the past 12 months

More than half said their productivity was affected by such an incident.

Operations of more than eight in 10 operational technology (OT) organisations have suffered from cyber instructions in the past 12 months, Fortinet’s  Asia 2022 Operational Technology Cybersecurity Report revealed.

About one-third even saw revenue, data loss, compliance and brand value impacted following security intrusions.

More than half of organisations said their productivity was affected due to an operation outage brought by intrusions, the majority (86%) took at least several hours to return to service, and some (21%) even took days to recover.

Of those who experience intrusions, only 12% have achieved centralised visibility of all OT activities.

“Given the expanding attack surface exacerbated by the convergence of IT and OT, a security fabric is essential to achieve a secure OT environment with compliance,” Cherry Fung, regional director of Hong Kong, Macau & Mongolia for Fortinet, said.

On the flip side, the study has found that OT security is gradually improving in Hong Kong, with 32% of organisations saying they have reached level 4, meaning that their cybersecurity processes are continually improving.