Managing External Connections to Your Operational Technology (OT) Environment

This Dragos briefing highlights that 70% of ICS environments have external connections (OEMs, IT networks, or the Internet), reports a doubling of ICS/OT vulnerabilities in 2021 (1,665 total) with 35% able to cause loss of view/control and ~90% lacking mitigations, and provides practical recommendations—VPN/jump-hosts, deny-by-default policies, MFA, enhanced logging/monitoring, and micro-segmentation—to reduce risk at the Level 4/Level 3 ICS boundary.