Across the global energy and resources sector – including utilities, oil and gas, chemicals, and metals and mining – cyber threats are accelerating at a pace that outstrips traditional approaches to security. Industry data reveals the severity of the challenge: energy assets have accounted for one‑third of all cybersecurity incidents since 2017, while electricity networks alone make up over a quarter of reported attacks. At the same time, the financial and operational consequences continue to grow. In 2024, a single attack on a major energy company resulted in $35 million USD in losses, underscoring how profoundly a single incident can impact operations, customers, and revenue.
As organizations modernize infrastructure, expand digital capabilities, connect legacy systems, and integrate operational and information technologies, the attack surface widens. The sector’s physical and digital environments are now inseparable – and adversaries are fully aware. To maintain reliability, safety, and compliance in this increasingly volatile threat landscape, companies must embrace a unified approach to securing identities, data, applications, operations, endpoints and incident response.
1. Increasing Cyber Threats Demand Holistic Protection Across IT, OT, and Cloud
Cyberattacks targeting the energy and resources sector continue to climb, with recent analysis showing a record rise in incidents affecting power, gas, chemicals, mining, and related commodities infrastructure. Modern attackers routinely exploit vulnerabilities that sit at the intersections of IT networks, cloud platforms, and operational technologies – taking advantage of misconfigurations, blind spots, and remote access pathways.
This evolving threat landscape makes siloed cybersecurity strategies insufficient. Protection must extend across hybrid environments, ensuring visibility into where threats originate, how they move, and which systems they aim to compromise. Platforms such as OpenTextTM Cybersecurity Cloud support this broader defensive posture by helping organizations strengthen identity controls, reduce attack surfaces, detect unusual behaviors earlier, and apply consistent protections across the full range of systems that power operations.
The result is a more resilient environment – one capable of anticipating threats, minimizing disruption, and safeguarding both the digital systems and the physical assets essential to the sector.
2. Regulatory and Compliance Expectations Are Intensifying
As the frequency and impact of cyber incidents increase, global regulators have escalated expectations for critical infrastructure protection. Rising attack counts across the energy sector reflect growing vulnerabilities tied to industrial modernization and distributed systems. This increased risk has led to more stringent standards, stricter reporting requirements, and higher penalties for non‑compliance.
Regulations governing electricity networks, oil and gas operations, and other critical infrastructure operations increasingly emphasize continuous monitoring, incident readiness, supply‑chain integrity, and the security of both physical and digital assets. Organizations can no longer rely on periodic audits or manual reporting processes. Instead, they must demonstrate ongoing adherence to frameworks that require strong identity governance, hardened operational environments, and verifiable cybersecurity controls across all critical systems.
To keep pace, energy and resources companies are turning to more automated and integrated cybersecurity practices – streamlining policy enforcement and improving visibility across diverse infrastructures. These capabilities not only reduce the risk of non‑compliance but also enhance operational stability and organizational readiness during times of heightened threat activity.
3. AI and Automation Are Transforming Cyber Defense for Critical Infrastructure
Staffing constraints, complex hybrid environments, and escalating threat volumes make manual cybersecurity operations increasingly impractical. At the same time, financially damaging cyber incidents are rising across multiple critical infrastructure sectors, including chemicals, power, energy, mining, and materials – where organizations reported some of the highest rates of financially significant attacks. AI‑enabled security operations are becoming essential to address these challenges. Automation allows teams to detect threats earlier, correlate signals across IT and OT systems, and respond at machine speed – reducing dwell time and limiting operational impact. In industrial environments, AI can help interpret anomalies in system behavior, identify suspicious activity across interconnected assets, and provide contextual insights that help teams differentiate normal fluctuations from genuine threat activity.
Platforms such as OpenText Cybersecurity Cloud bring these capabilities together across identity, endpoints, applications, cloud workloads, and devices – helping organizations scale protection without scaling headcount. By enhancing visibility, accelerating response, and reducing complexity, AI and automation help maintain safe, continuous operations across the entire energy and resources value chain.
If you’d like to explore how cybersecurity can strengthen resilience across your physical and digital assets, connect with the OpenText team.
