How AI Threatens the Industrial Control Systems in Small and Mid-Size Manufacturing

As we move towards 2026 and AI tools become more capable, hackers are turning to them more and more, creating new threats across the board. 

AI tools let cyber criminals scrape public sources for personal information of potential victims, moving from phishing attacks that cast a wide net to sending personalized one-to-one emails that spoof people they interact with. Almost 70% of cyber breaches come from spearphishing and valid accounts, providing a unified login experience and strict access controls can help protect your organization from attacks.

Implementing Agilicus AnyX, a Zero Trust Architecture, helps to protect your organization from evolving threats with tools like multi-factor authentication and single sign-on to strengthen your identity verification process and streamline access, privileged access management to ensure your users can access only what they need to complete their job, and outbound only access to hide remote access sessions from being publicly scannable.

We explore how you can protect your organizations’ networks and industrial control systems in a new cyber threat landscape by adopting a Zero Trust approach to cyber security and access.

• Provide your users a unified login experience across all resources to make spoofed login sites more obvious
• Implement multi-factor authentication and single sign-on to add an extra layer of security to access attempts
• Prevent over-broad access by only allowing users to reach the systems they need with privileged access management
• Eliminate shared passwords for legacy systems floating around the office with password stuffing upon a successful connection and authorization attempt