Kaspersky notes slight decrease in attacks against ICS 

On March 19, 2024, the cybersecurity firm Kaspersky published a report on cyberattacks against industrial control systems (ICS) around the world in 2023. Titled “Threat landscape for industrial automation systems,” it complements previous studies with figures for the second half of 2023. 

And according to the report, threats have declined. The percentage of ICS targeted by cyberattacks around the world thus dropped from 34% to 31.9%. For the year as a whole, it stood at 38.6%, returning to its 2020 levels, after surges in 2021 (39.6%) and in 2022 (40.6%).

In regard to the source of the hacking attempts, 22.8% of ICS worldwide suffered attacks through the Internet, 5.4% through customer emails and 3.2%, thanks to outside hardware. The last source of infection has been in steady decline since 2020, when it affected 7% of ICS around the world. 

The report states that the percentage of ICS attacked dropped drastically in the areas most affected by the phenomenon, in particular in Asian sub regions and in Russia. East Asia, Southeast Asia and Russia experienced a decrease of over 5% between 2022 and 2023.

However, threats are on the rise in Europe, going from 30% to 34.5% for ICS in Eastern Europe, and from 18% to 21.6% in Western Europe. The first half of 2023 even saw the highest level of attacks on Western European ICS since Kaspersky began publishing the statistics in early 2020.