OT Cybersecurity Incidents Are Surging in 2025 — And the Alarms Are Impossible to Ignore
The SANS Institute has released its 2025 ICS/OT Cybersecurity Report, and if your work touches operational technology in any capacity, this is your wake-up call. The findings show that cyber incidents in industrial environments are not only increasing, but becoming more disruptive, more expensive and dramatically harder to recover from.
Check out the original deep dive by Industrial Cyber — an insightful read worth pairing with your morning coffee: Read the full Industrial Cyber report.
Cyber Incidents Are Hitting Nearly 1 in 4 Organizations
In 2025, 22% of organizations reported an OT cybersecurity incident. Nearly half detected issues within 24 hours — encouraging, sure — but recovery times paint a much rougher picture.
• 40% caused operational disruption
• 22% took 2–7 days to recover
• 19% took over a month
• 3% took more than a year
In industries where downtime equals disaster, these numbers are more than statistics — they’re business-critical warnings.
Remote Access: Still the Achilles’ Heel
SANS found that unauthorized remote access was responsible for half of all incidents. Yet only 13% of organizations had fully implemented essential protections such as ICS-aware access controls or secure session recording.
Many teams still lack visibility over their remote access points — a dangerous blind spot in an era where attackers exploit any crack they can find.
Think of it as running an industrial operation without knowing which doors are unlocked.
Detection Improves — But Recovery Is Still the Bottleneck
The good news? Organizations are improving detection and containment. Nearly 50% identify attacks within 24 hours, and 60% contain them within 48 hours.
The bad news? Getting back to safe, stable operations is where most teams struggle.
Containment is progress — but resilience requires fast, reliable recovery. Segmenting networks, strengthening backup processes and applying cyber-informed engineering practices are now essential.
Regulation and Threat Intelligence Are Steering 2026
Nearly 60% of organizations now fall under mandatory cybersecurity requirements, and 67% are actively using threat intelligence to inform decisions. Investments for 2026–2027 are shifting clearly toward:
• Asset visibility • Secure remote access • Advanced threat detection
Preparedness: The High-Maturity Secret Weapon
One standout insight: organizations involving operators, engineers and technicians in response training were 1.7x more likely to feel prepared for OT cyber events.
These are the people who understand exactly how attacks impact process integrity, safety and uptime at the control-loop level.
What This Means for SMB Industrial Operations
The biggest challenges? Resource limitations, legacy equipment, and slow recovery times. But SANS highlights practical steps every organization can take today.
• Improve asset visibility
• Harden and monitor remote access
• Treat detection and recovery as equal priorities
• Leverage threat intelligence
• Involve operators in cybersecurity planning
Where TNT Nerds Fits Into This Evolving Landscape
For many small and mid-sized industrial businesses, modernization can feel overwhelming — especially with tight internal resources or older systems. That’s where TNT Nerds steps in.
We’ve supported manufacturers, logistics operations, utilities and industrial teams with solutions such as:
• Secure remote access modernization
• Segmentation and ICS network hardening
• OT/IT bridge architecture and strategy
• Asset visibility and monitoring implementation
• Backup, failover and recovery engineering
• SOC workflow integration
• Cyber‑informed engineering guidance
Whether your goal is safe modernization, better resilience or ensuring compliance, TNT Nerds provides the engineering know‑how and hands-on expertise needed to reduce risk without halting operations.
Curious how your OT security maturity compares?
Let’s talk. TNT Nerds speaks industrial, speaks engineering and knows how to close the gap between cybersecurity and real-world operations.
Source: Industrial Cyber — reported by Anna Ribeiro.
