Hacks Up, Budgets Down: OT Oversight Must Be An IT Priority
Security Boulevard, December 11,2025
OT oversight is an expensive industrial paradox. It's hard to believe that an area can be simultaneously underappreciated, underfunded, and under increasing attack. And yet, with ransomware hackers knowing that downtime equals disaster and companies not monitoring in kind, this is an open and glaring hole across many ecosystems.
Even a glance at the numbers reveals the scale of the threat. Attacks are up 70% year over year in manufacturing because bad actors know that unplanned production pauses account for hundreds of billions of dollars in lost annual revenue among the world's largest companies. Nonetheless, only 45% of these manufacturers report adequately monitoring OT, and nearly half of the organizations surveyed by Opswat spend just a quarter of their security budget on critical infrastructure protection.
This is a technological, cultural, and budgeting issue that teams must address immediately. Here's how.