Industrial Networks Remain Vulnerable to Internet Exposure: A Persistent Cybersecurity Threat

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Industrial Networks Expose Critical Systems to the Internet

Industrial networks continue to expose critical systems to the internet, despite growing awareness of the risks. A recent report by Palo Alto Networks, Siemens, and Idaho National Laboratory highlights the scope of this exposure, revealing that many industrial operators still run remote access portals, building automation servers, and other operational technology services on public IP address ranges.

Exposure of Industrial Devices

According to the report, the number of industrial devices exposed to the internet has increased significantly over the past year. In 2024, over 110 million observations of operational technology (OT) devices were made, a 138% increase over the previous year. This translates to 19,633,628 unique OT devices and services being fingerprinted, a 332% increase over 2023. These devices were hosted on 1.77 million IPv4 addresses, a 41.6% increase over 2023.

Geographic Breakdown

The geographic breakdown of exposed OT devices shows the highest concentrations in the United States, China, and Germany, with major urban hubs such as Beijing, Frankfurt, and Shenzhen being prominent in the city rankings. The most frequently observed products were tied to building management systems, including Tridium Niagara, Linear eMerge, and Saia PCD Web Server.

Exposure Points in OT Environments

The report also highlights the common exposure points in OT environments, with standard web ports such as TCP 443 and TCP 80 accounting for the largest volumes of observed services. This indicates that many systems are reachable through conventional HTTPS and HTTP connections. OT-specific ports, such as TCP 5011, TCP 502, and UDP 47808, also appeared frequently, often associated with industrial protocols and building automation traffic.

Xu Zou, SVP of Cloud Delivered Security Services at Palo Alto Networks, notes that the “persistent assumption of isolation” remains a central technical barrier. “Many organizations still treat OT as an air-gapped island, which leads to security strategies that only start once an attacker reaches the plant floor. This results in a lack of visibility at the network edge – the convergence layer where 70% of OT-impacting attacks begin.”

Organizational Barriers

Zou emphasizes that organizational barriers compound the issue. “Many industrial security programs are heavily focused on asset inventories and passive telemetry alone. While visibility is essential, it is insufficient without detection capability. To operationalize this at scale, organizations must overcome the siloed nature of IT and OT security. We advocate for IT-OT SOC convergence, which allows for coordinated detection at the edge.”

Predictive Analysis

The report identifies five dominant precursor technique families, including execution via scripting, execution via native API, command-and-control using standard application-layer protocols, discovery through remote system discovery, and execution via a CLI. It also notes that Windows command-line process audit logging is disabled by default, and PowerShell Script Block Logging is also disabled by default.

OT-SOC Roadmap

The OT-SOC roadmap breaks implementation into time windows, with key highlights including limited data collection supported by an OT dedicated SIEM within 0-3 months, baselining and a pilot SOC in a limited plant area within 3-6 months, integrating OT and IT playbooks plus tabletop exercises within 6-18 months, and maturity into automation, AI analytics, and cross-site threat hunts within 18-36 months.

Conclusion

The report concludes that large volumes of OT services remain reachable from the public internet, and long precursor phases create extended periods where observable activity can accumulate across enterprise and industrial layers.