In the past several years, a flood of vulnerabilities has hit industrial control systems (ICS) – the technological backbone of electric grids, water supplies, and production lines. These vulnerabilities affect the reliable operation of sensors, programmable controllers, software and networking equipment used to automate and monitor the physical processes that keep our modern world running.

FireEye iSIGHT Intelligence has identified nearly 1,600 publicly disclosed ICS vulnerabilities since 2000. We go more in depth on these issues in our latest report, Overload: Critical Lessons from 15 Years of ICS Vulnerabilities, which highlights trends in total ICS vulnerability disclosures, patch availability, vulnerable device type and vulnerabilities exploited in the wild.

FireEye’s acquisition of iSIGHT provided tremendous visibility into the depth and breadth of vulnerabilities in the ICS landscape and how threat actors try to exploit them. To make matters worse, many of these vulnerabilities are left unpatched and some are simply unpatchable due to outdated technology, thus increasing the attack surface for potential adversaries. In fact, nation-state cyber threat actors have exploited five of these vulnerabilities in attacks since 2009.

Unfortunately, security personnel from manufacturing, energy, water and other industries are often unaware of their own control system assets, not to mention the vulnerabilities that affect them. As a result, organizations operating these systems are missing the warnings and leaving their industrial environments exposed to potential threats.

Click here to download the report and learn more.