When you ask the board of directors for an increase in cybersecurity budget, you are typically met with one simple question: “Why should we spend this much?” The honest answer is: because of the vulnerabilities sitting at the heart of your operational infrastructure—vulnerabilities no one has had the courage to look at until now. ICS/SCADA systems are the backbone of every industry; from refineries and power plants to production lines and water facilities. Unlike classic IT environments, these systems interact directly with the physical world—which means a single vulnerability can lead to production shutdowns, environmental contamination, or even loss of life.
According to the IBM X-Force Threat Intelligence Index 2024, attacks on the manufacturing and energy sectors rank among the top five attacker targets, and for the third consecutive year, manufacturing has claimed the top spot as the most victimized industry worldwide. This is no coincidence; attackers understand that halting a production line creates far greater economic and media pressure than stealing a database. This is also why the Mandiant M-Trends 2024 report shows that the average attacker dwell time in operational environments before detection is noticeably higher in the ICS sector than in other industries—meaning attackers have ample opportunity to identify and exploit vulnerabilities in control equipment.
The fundamental problem with ICS is its age and heterogeneity. Many of the devices running on production floors today are built on operating systems that are no longer supported. Security patches either don’t exist, or applying them means shutting down production for several hours and absorbing supplier penalties. Gartner, in its report Predicts 2024: Cybersecurity and Risk Management, warns that by the end of 2026, more than half of organizations with critical infrastructure will still be running systems in their operational network that have fallen out of the support cycle. This means our attack surface is not shrinking—it is growing larger by the day.
But the key question for the board is not “How many vulnerabilities do we have?”—it is: “If an attacker exploits one of these vulnerabilities tomorrow, what will the cost of our business downtime be?” The answer to that question is the common language of the CEO and board members: the language of money, risk, and continuity. Once you put that number transparently on the table, the discussion is no longer about “purchasing a license”—it is about “organizational survival.” A single cyber-physical incident can, within hours, destroy customer trust, brand reputation, and the legal licenses required to operate.
To break out of this situation, three actions must be placed on the board’s immediate agenda. First, develop a comprehensive inventory of all ICS/SCADA assets and the criticality level of each; without this map, every security decision is built on sand. Second, segment the operational network from the corporate network and implement a resilient network architecture in layered defense—because according to Mandiant data, in the majority of ICS intrusions, attackers entered through the IT environment. Third, establish a dedicated incident response program for operational scenarios, in which decisions are made in minute zero—not days later.
Ultimately, industrial infrastructure security is not an optional expense—it is the insurance policy for organizational survival against threats that grow more sophisticated every day. If you do not invest in this today, tomorrow you will pay the cost of downtime, reconstruction, and rebuilding trust; a cost far heavier than any preventive budget you place on the table today.
The Razban Atlas Fanavaran team, specializing in OT/ICS assessments and the design of security architectures tailored to the country’s industries, stands ready to assist security teams and senior executives in developing this roadmap.
