Focus on Hitting Lower, Not Harder

Hey, thanks, Jeff.

Really appreciate it.

Happy to be here.

Absolutely.

You know, had a chance to attend the Fortinet Conference over in Michigan a couple weeks ago.

A lot of great information out there and a lot of stuff, especially talking about some of the new threats that the industrial sector is facing.

From your perspective, Richard, where are some of the biggest things coming from? What's sort of lighting up your radar right now?

Yeah, so what stands out first is ransomware, specifically targeting manufacturing.

And not only that, but the U.S. is the biggest regional target on top of that.

So, you know, things shifted a couple of years ago when the bad actors figured out how to monetize production interruption or impacts the supply chain, you know, what have you, is that that changed everything.

The focus to really prey upon manufacturing.

And so that continues to this day.

You know, for the fifth year in a row, manufacturing is the number one ransom target.

So I call these attacks from the north, right? I mean, this largely starts in the IT side, and then it can cross over into the OT network.

Or there's an indirect impact from processes or other types of solutions that have an impact into the production environment.

So at the end, then we see the line stop, quite honestly.

And that, again, is the added unfortunate effect of a ransomware event, but then they're monetizing that production on top of it.

So there's that.

And that, unfortunately, you know, has been going on for quite some time.

And, you know, our customers continue to really elevate the OT risk.

And so now it's been validated.

They're investing towards it.

And, you know, but they're starting with the basics, visibility, segmentation, secure remote access.

So it's taking some time to really ramp up where the IT bad actors have been in the sophisticated enterprise world for numerous years.

So there's a little maturity imbalance there.