By: Marc Schwartz, President of Ozone IT Services
Why RTO, RPO, and tested recovery processes determine whether downtime costs you hours—or a quarter’s profit.
Modern conflict doesn’t stop at borders. When the United States—and its partners—conduct offensive operations overseas, retaliation increasingly happens in cyberspace. For U.S. companies, that means the next business disruption may arrive not as a missile, but as a compromised network, damaged Operational Technology (OT) controls, or a coordinated outage. This is not theory; government agencies and public intelligence make the case clear: geopolitical strikes raise the probability of cyber-attacks on U.S. infrastructure and companies.
Below is what IT managers and executives need to understand about this evolving threat, the statistics that matter, the industries most at risk, and what to do now.
Why international strikes translate into domestic cyber risk
Two realities drive this connection:
- State and proxy actors use cyber-attacks as a low-cost asymmetric response. When physical force would escalate conflict, adversaries (or their proxies and hacktivist supporters) can cause economic pain and political signaling through cyber operations. The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency warns that Iran-aligned cyber actors respond to major destructive events with increased activity and disruption. (CISA)
- Attackers target civilians to maximize economic and psychological impact. Past campaigns tied to Iran showed coordinated Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) against U.S. banks and operations that sought to disrupt services rather than only steal data—an approach likely to be repeated in retaliation. The FBI’s public records document Iranian-linked DDoS campaigns against nearly 50 U.S. financial institutions in earlier campaigns. (Federal Bureau of Investigation)
This isn’t random vandalism. It’s strategic pressure, and it disproportionately hits organizations with exposed infrastructure or unvalidated recovery processes.
Hard facts every executive should keep front of mind
The statistics below matter because retaliation campaigns are intended to create prolonged operational pain and public anxiety. The faster you detect and recover, the less leverage attackers gain.
- The average cost of a data breach globally hit $4.88 million in IBM’s latest reporting, and industrial sectors often face above-average detection and containment timelines. Slower detection makes geopolitical-driven intrusions costlier. (IBM)
- Industrial organizations typically take 199 days to identify a breach and 73 days to contain it. These windows give determined actors time to escalate damage. (IBM)
- Manufacturers have faced an average of 11.6 days of downtime after ransomware incidents, at costs that can be roughly $1.9M per day—an example of how operational outages ripple into severe financial impact. (Comparitech)
These are not abstract numbers. They are the operational truth that determine whether disruption is an annoyance or an existential business event.
Who is most likely to be targeted?
Analysts and government advisories show recurring patterns: attackers go after sectors that are both critical and vulnerable.
- Financial services. Past Iranian-linked campaigns focused on banks to create public panic and financial friction; financial institutions remain high-value, high-impact targets. (Federal Bureau of Investigation)
- Manufacturing and industrial control systems (ICS/OT). These systems keep supply chains moving; attackers can produce immediate, visible disruption (production delays, missed shipments). The industrial sector’s lengthy breach timelines and high per-day downtime make it a clear target. (IBM)
- Energy and utilities. Physical attacks on energy infrastructure and cyber attempts to disrupt grid or transport nodes (like the Strait of Hormuz disruptions) make energy a primary target in regional conflicts. Government advisories specifically warn of threats to critical infrastructure following kinetic strikes. (CISA)
- Transportation & logistics, healthcare, and government services. Outages in these sectors produce public pain and visibility, multiplying political and economic pressure.
Attack patterns to expect in a heightened threat environment
In periods of geopolitical escalation, cyber activity often follows predictable patterns. Organizations should expect an increase in distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) and saturation attacks targeting public portals and customer-facing systems, designed to overwhelm infrastructure and disrupt access to services.
More destructive attacks may also emerge, including targeted sabotage such as “wiper” malware and ransomware campaigns intended to erase backups or cripple restoration capabilities. Another common tactic is supply-chain compromise, where attackers infiltrate trusted software providers or service vendors to impact multiple organizations simultaneously through a single breach.
These technical attacks are frequently accompanied by propaganda and psychological operations, such as website defacements or manipulated communications, intended to undermine public trust and create confusion. Federal agencies have repeatedly warned that these types of coordinated cyber activities tend to intensify during and after major military or geopolitical actions, making them a persistent risk during periods of international conflict. (CISA)
The executive question: are your defenses measured by reality or by assumption?
Many organizations believe they are protected because they have an MSP, cloud backups, or endpoint security tools in place. Unfortunately, that assumption is often what attackers rely on. Retaliatory cyber campaigns frequently exploit gaps that exist between what companies think is protected and what has actually been validated. For example, backups may exist but have never been tested to confirm that critical systems—such as ERP databases—can be restored within the required recovery window.
Patch management is another common weakness. Unpatched systems remain one of the easiest entry points for both opportunistic hackers and state-linked threat actors. Disaster recovery plans often look solid on paper but are rarely tested through automated, recurring restore exercises that prove systems can be recovered under pressure. At the same time, identity and endpoint security gaps can give attackers the ability to move laterally through networks once initial access is gained, especially when accounts are overprivileged or segmentation is weak. When international events raise the overall threat level, these overlooked weaknesses become the first areas that adversaries probe.
What leaders should do now (practically, and immediately)
- Raise threat posture for critical functions. Treat the next 60–90 days as an elevated-risk window: prioritize systems tied to production, energy, finance, and customer access. (Follow CISA/DHS advisories for actionable indicators.)
- Validate your backups and restores—now. A stored backup is not a recovered system: run verified restores of ERP and OT workloads, and measure RTO/RPO against business thresholds. (Comparitech)
- Patch and segment aggressively. Ensure internet-facing systems and high-privilege identities are hardened and monitored; exploitations of unpatched systems remain a dominant initial vector. (Verizon)
- Coordinate with suppliers and MSPs. Ask hard questions: what has changed in our environment? Which new systems were spun up without telling your IT provider? Independent validation is essential.
- Run tabletop exercises linked to board and CFO metrics. Translate outage minutes to dollars so executives and Finance own recovery goals.
Why companies still miss these gaps — and how help arrives
Most MSPs focus on uptime and patching coverage; few independently validate whether backups, Disaster Recovery orchestration, or Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) restores work under pressure. Systems change constantly—decommissioned services, new cloud components, and undocumented integrations create blind spots. That’s why companies call in external recovery specialists once an incident occurs.
Ozone IT Services has repeatedly been engaged post-ransomware attacks because customers discovered their assumptions didn’t match reality: backups that weren’t complete, recovery procedures that hadn’t been tested, and overlooked endpoints that gave attackers access. External validation featuring independent restore tests, RTO/RPO modeling, and automated Disaster Recovery orchestration is the only way to prove resilience before you need it.
Take Action
Start with an assessment. Ask your team and your MSP: when was your last successful restore of ERP/OT? Who validated it independently?
If you can’t answer confidently, schedule an independent recovery readiness assessment now—test one workload this quarter and quantify your real recovery time and data loss exposure.
Chris Mackin is Vice President of Sales at Ozone IT Services with more than 25 years of experience designing and delivering cybersecurity and IT solutions that help organizations reduce risk, protect revenue, and operate with confidence. He is a trusted advisor to business and technology leaders, known for aligning Backup as a Service (BaaS), Patching as a Service (PaaS), and security infrastructure strategies to real-world operational and financial goals.
