The Threat Landscape Didn’t Shift, it Mutated.
Let’s stop pretending critical infrastructure is “harder to hit” because it’s industrial.
You’re not dealing with opportunistic attackers anymore. You’re up against a massive and organized economy built to monetize disruption.
Here’s the uncomfortable truth:
If your operations matter, your environment is already in someone’s target list.
Operational Technology (OT) isn’t a side quest for threat actors, it’s the main campaign. Why? Because downtime is leverage and in infrastructure, leverage becomes ransom.
OT is increasingly connected to business applications and IT networks, and when those connections aren’t assembled securely, they create paths for adversaries to move between environments.
CISA is blunt about it: weak authentication, insecure remote access, and insufficient segmentation make lateral movement from IT to OT not just possible, but predictable.
So, if you’re still defending your plant like it’s 2005, you’re not behind. You’re exposed.
The Scale of the Threat
This isn’t “a few ransomware crews.”
It’s an ecosystem, hundreds of groups, thousands of supporting nodes, and a volume that never sleeps.
One open ransomware intelligence tracker currently reports:
- 536 ransomware groups tracked
- 646 relays online out of 2,427 total (the infrastructure behind the machine)
- 31 victim posts in the last 24 hours
- 544 posts this month (so far)
- 27,790 total posts archived — a long, ugly record of organizations already compromised
Read that again.
This isn’t “risk.” It’s momentum.
Ransomware isn’t just malware anymore, it’s a supply chain of criminal services: access brokers, credential sellers, initial exploit specialists, extortion negotiators, and data-leak operators.
Infrastructure is the perfect victim because:
- You can’t “just reboot” a refinery,
- You can’t “pause” a water system,
- You can’t “delay” a grid operator without consequences.
- Your adversary knows that.
Vulnerabilities in the Supply Chain and Critical Infrastructure
These numbers are especially dangerous for infrastructure because OT risk isn’t isolated, it’s inherited.
Your security posture is only as strong as your:
- Integrators,
- Maintenance vendors,
- Third-party remote access,
- Connected IT identities,
- Visibility into what’s actually running.
Visibility is where most organizations quietly lose the fight.
A Ponemon survey cited in industry analysis found 73% of respondents said they lack an authoritative OT asset inventory, and 69% reported having either no inventory or an inaccurate/outdated one.
That means many operators can’t confidently answer the most basic question in cyber defense:
What do you have and what’s talking to what?
CISA reinforces why this is fatal: an OT asset inventory is foundational, because without an inventory, organizations do not know what they have and what should be secured and protected.
Now add supply chain reality:
- Vendors often need remote access.
- Integrators introduce tools, accounts, and paths you didn’t design.
- “Temporary” access becomes permanent.
- Legacy devices keep running because replacement is expensive and downtime is political.
Infrastructure doesn’t fail fast.
It fails catastrophically.
Transition: Why Traditional Security Isn’t Enough
Old Reality: “Air-gapped + Firewall = Safe”
That worked when OT networks were truly isolated and when your control systems didn’t depend on IT for analytics, scheduling, remote operations, and reporting.
New Reality: Converged Networks and Converged Consequences
Today, OT and IT are increasingly interconnected, and those connections can introduce paths for attackers to move between networks if not integrated securely.
CISA calls out the exact failure mode defenders keep underestimating: insufficient network segmentation enabling lateral movement from IT to OT environments.
Here’s the scenario you should be planning for (because threat actors already are):
A single leaked credential on a contractor’s laptop → remote access foothold → IT privilege escalation → lateral movement → OT jump → operational disruption.
That’s not fear-mongering.
That’s the modern kill chain and it’s why “traditional security” is losing:
- IT tools can’t always see OT protocols, devices, and safety constraints.
- OT teams prioritize uptime and safety — and often inherit insecure-by-design legacy systems.
- Security ownership becomes unclear (“Is this IT’s problem or OT’s problem?”) until it becomes everyone’s emergency.
Meanwhile, your adversary doesn’t care about your organization chart.
How OTNexus Protects Your Perimeter
If you want to secure critical infrastructure in 2026, you need more than dashboards, alerts, and vendor promises. You need truth and clear visibility into your environment, uncompromised compliance, a hardened baseline, and the intelligence to act before attackers do.
OTNexus delivers exactly that. Not as another “tool,” but as the operational backbone of your security program.
1. Deep OT Asset Inventory: Document What You Actually Own
Most organizations don’t actually know what digital assets they have, how they’re connected, or what business processes they affect. Therefore CISA makes clear, OT asset inventory is foundational because without an inventory, organizations do not know what they have and what should be secured and protected.
This gap is real, the Ponemon survey shows 73% of OT operators lack an authoritative OT asset inventory, and 69% either have no inventory or one that’s outdated.
OTNexus closes that gap permanently.
What OTNexus does:
- Helps you in creating a deep, structured, always-current asset inventory covering OT, IT, and supporting digital assets.
- Maps criticality, roles, communication pathways, and dependencies.
- Gives you the visibility CISA says is mandatory for modern defensible architecture.
This isn’t just asset tracking. It’s operational clarity.
2. Compliance & Audit Management: Built Into the Workflow
Infrastructure operators already face tightening compliance mandates from regulators, insurers, parent companies, and national cybersecurity bodies. But compliance collapses without documentation, repeatability, and traceability.
OTNexus brings audit-readiness into the core of your operations.
What OTNexus does:
- Maintains evidence, configurations, approvals, and change records.
- Helps map your environment to frameworks like IEC 62443, NIST CSF, and CISA’s defensible architecture model.
- Eliminates the scramble of “audit season” by keeping you continuously compliant, not seasonally compliant.
You move from “collecting evidence” to living in compliance.
3. Baseline Security for Every Digital Asset
Security collapses when teams operate on assumptions.
Baseline configurations is the minimum acceptable security posture and are rarely defined, let alone enforced.
OTNexus fixes that.
What OTNexus does:
- Help you in Establishing baseline security policies across OT and IT systems.
- Tracks drift and deviations across time, vendors, and operators.
- Ensures critical assets stay hardened even as environments evolve.
No more silent configuration changes.
No more uncertainty.
No more surprises during incidents.
4. Intelligence-Driven Patch & Vulnerability Decisions
You don’t just need vulnerability data, you need actionable insight.
CISA highlights the necessity of real-time monitoring, mapping vulnerabilities to known exploited lists (like KEV), and prioritizing based on criticality.
But most OT environments lack the automation and context to do this effectively.
OTNexus steps in as your intelligence engine.
What OTNexus does:
- Correlates vulnerabilities with your live asset inventory.
- Prioritizes based on criticality, exposure paths, and operational risk.
- Supports patch decision-making with context:
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- Which assets are vulnerable?
- Which systems can’t be patched immediately?
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- Documents every action for future audits and regulatory requirements.
You go from reactive patching to strategic vulnerability management
Bottom Line
OTNexus does what traditional OT security tools can’t:
It gives you control of your assets, your compliance, your baselines, and your decision-making.
This is the foundation modern infrastructure security requires and it’s exactly what attackers hope you don’t have.
Don’t Become a Statistic
We’re past the “if” phase.
When an open ransomware tracker shows 536 groups, thousands of relays, and tens of thousands of historical victim posts, you don’t need more proof that organizations are being compromised at scale. On the other hand, when CISA is telling the world that OT is a prime target, that insecure connections create movement paths, and that segmentation + inventory are foundational, the playbook is no longer optional reading.
So here’s the question that matters:
Do you want to be ready, or do you want to be a case study?
Book a demo of OTNexus and secure your operations against the ransomware ecosystem that’s active in the wild right now.
