Why Internet-connected OT infrastructure presents a security risk to company data

**Executive Summary:** Censys analyzed Internet-exposed Operational Technology (OT) services and found 110,246 OT protocol instances across ~101,484 unique IPv4 addresses (16 protocols tracked); many counts are inflated by pseudo-services and honeypots (notably ATG/GasPot), roughly 40% of services are located in the United States with hotspots like Istanbul, and the report recommends immediate mitigations—network segmentation, logging/monitoring, hardening public services, and continuous external attack-surface monitoring using Censys tools.