Critical Infrastructure Often Under Cyberattack, Study Says
A new survey on the state of the world’s critical infrastructure security has found it’s not as secure as it should be — and that’s making IT insiders angry.

In an article on the PC World website, Robert McMillan says the survey by IDC asked management, network engineers and administrators in nine infrastructure industries about the state of cyber security in the US, Canada and Europe.

“Insiders felt that all of these industries, save financial services, were unprepared for cyberattacks,” McMillan says. “These unready industries included: water, utilities, oil and gas, telecommunications, transportation, emergency services, chemical and the shipping industry.”

More than half of respondents said their companies had already been hit with some sort of cyber incident, data leak, or insider attack, and another 14 percent said they were expecting something like this to happen in the next year.

“None of them thought that they were very prepared for either insider threats or data leakage,” Elan Winkler, director of critical infrastructure solutions with Secure Computing, told McMillan.

The Energy Insights survey also found that many insiders are dissatisfied with the lack of preparedness within their own industries. Almost 75 percent of respondents said they were “annoyed, angry or frustrated” with the state of critical infrastructure security.

“These are the people who actually know what’s going on and they’re unhappy,” Winkler told McMillan. “That, to me was a real surprise.”