Beyond Vulnerability Scanning

In operational technology environments, the margin for error is zero. A single misconfiguration can halt production, compromise safety, or expose critical infrastructure. With ransomware attacks against industrial organizations surging 87% in 2024, understanding the difference between pen testing and red teaming is mission-critical.

Penetration Testing: The Vulnerability Hunter

Penetration testing simulates an attack to identify security gaps in specific systems, applications, or networks, providing actionable remediation guidance.

Traditional pentests focus on technical vulnerabilities using techniques like vulnerability scans, API monitoring, or reverse engineering. Think of it as a security audit with a checklist: find flaws, document them, move on. Pentests typically last three to six weeks.

OT Red Team Assessment: The Reality Check

Red Team operations simulate realistic attacks based on adversary tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) from known Advanced Persistent Threats (APTs). This helps assess whether people, processes, and technology can prevent, detect, and respond to sophisticated threats.

Red Team Testing finds a single entry point, exploits it, and moves laterally through systems undetected. Red team assessments include technical controls, human factors like user awareness, and non-technical aspects like incident response procedures.

Red team assessments extend from three weeks to several months, as the team emulates real-world attackers aiming to avoid detection.

The AIC Priority Shift

Industrial cybersecurity flips the traditional CIA triad to AIC (Availability, Integrity, Confidentiality) because in OT environments, keeping systems running is the top priority.

This fundamental difference changes everything. Conducting a red team assessment in an OT environment requires careful planning, involving all relevant asset owners, identifying critical systems, and assessing potential risks to prevent harm to systems, people, and the environment.

From a technical perspective, vulnerability scanning in OT environments must be performed with extreme caution to avoid unpredictable effects on safety, unlike IT environments.

OT red team engagements test real-world scenarios:

• Ransomware resilience testing: Can your organization recover systems and maintain safety during an active attack?
• Protocol exploitation: Do insecure SCADA communications create pathways for attackers?
• Physical security assessment: Could someone gain direct access to critical equipment?

During engagements, red teams may be tasked with gaining access to critical control systems and designing destructive attacks, with goals of modeling scenarios that could cause significant physical impact to both safety and operations.

In 2020, Mandiant conducted a red team assessment on an industrial boiler facility operating a Distributed Control System. Starting from a single IP address in the OT network, the team used publicly available tools (Wireshark, Responder, Hashcat, CrackMapExec) to achieve administrative control over OPC servers and clients in just six hours.

The breakthrough came from weak password implementations, not DCS vulnerabilities. The team captured password hashes through man-in-the-middle attacks and cracked them in six seconds. With control over the OPC servers, Mandiant modeled a destructive attack scenario: lowering water levels in a boiler drum below safe thresholds while bypassing safety mechanisms, potentially causing catastrophic overheating or explosion.

This engagement demonstrates the unique value of OT red team assessments. Common security tools reached critical process networks quickly, and the consequence-driven analysis showed actual physical impacts, not just theoretical vulnerabilities.

Start with Penetration Testing If:

• Your security program is less than 2 years mature
• You have insecure remote access conditions, with 65% of OT environments experiencing such conditions in 2024
• You're in the one-in-four organizations where default credentials still exist
• You need compliance validation for NERC CIP or IEC 62443

Graduate to Red Team Assessments When:

• Regular penetration tests identify fewer vulnerabilities
• You need to test incident response capabilities and validate detection abilities
• You want to emulate attacks based on threat intelligence relevant to your industry
• You need to validate that your security operations center can detect and respond to sophisticated attacks

Ransomware attacks in the industrial sector spiked 87% in 2024, marking the fourth consecutive year this industry has been the top ransomware target. More concerning, 73% of organizations experienced OT intrusions in 2024, up sharply from 49% in 2023.

In 2024, 25% of ransomware cases involved full OT site shutdown, and 75% caused operational disruption. Two new ICS/OT-specific malware strains emerged (FrostyGoop and Fuxnet). In January 2024, FrostyGoop caused a two-day heating loss to over 600 Ukrainian apartment buildings during sub-zero temperatures.

75% of OT attacks begin as IT breaches and 70% of OT systems are projected to connect to IT networks in the next year.

Global ICS/OT exposure rose 12% in 2024, with exposed devices increasing from 160,000 to 180,000 unique IP addresses. Nearly half of organizations still lack OT-specific network monitoring capabilities, leaving critical detection gaps.

Security testing without ongoing defense is like a smoke detector without a fire department. PhishCloud helps you build both.

Through our consulting services, we guide organizations in establishing effective Cyber Fusion Centers using their existing security infrastructure. Rather than selling a product, we help you optimize your current systems and processes to achieve unified threat intelligence, security operations, and incident response across converged IT/OT environments.

Our consulting methodology addresses:

• Integration strategy for real-time monitoring across IT and OT segments
• Threat intelligence programs tailored to your industry and assets
• Security event correlation leveraging your existing SIEM and monitoring tools
• Incident response playbooks designed for OT-specific scenarios
• Red team exercise frameworks within safe, controlled environments

We help you transform fragmented security tools into a cohesive defensive capability, ensuring your organization can detect and neutralize threats before they impact operations.

The gap between adequate and excellent OT security has never been clearer. In 2024, the average cost of an industrial data breach jumped $830,000 per incident. Nation-state attacks tripled, with many targeting physical consequences in critical infrastructure.

The question isn't whether to invest in security testing. It's whether your current approach can protect you against increasingly sophisticated adversaries.

The reality: Knowing your vulnerabilities (pentesting) is step one. Proving your defenses work (red teaming) is step two. Establishing unified monitoring and response capabilities is step three.

Ready to see if your defenses hold up against real-world attacks? Visit phishcloud.com to schedule a consultation and learn how our cyber fusion expertise can help you optimize your security operations for the OT environment.