Manufacturers under cyberattack at unprecedented levels

Cyberattacks against manufacturing companies reached a record high, according to research by KnowBe4.

Researchers found that in addition to attacks reaching new highs, hackers are targeting manufacturers more than any other sector.

“The raw materials, processes, equipment, and labor that make up manufacturing are fundamental to commerce, and the foundation of a nation’s economic health,” KnowBe4 said in its report citing raw data from IBM X-Force.

“The manufacturing sector is also the most frequently attacked by cybercriminals, making security and prevention of attacks a key priority for ensuring the continued delivery of goods and services.”

According to the KnowBe4 researchers, attacks against manufacturing companies account for 25.7% of all reported cyberattacks in the enterprise sector, up from 24.8% the previous year.

By comparison, finance and insurance companies were the second most common target, with a share of 18.2%, followed by “professional, business, and consumer services” at 15.4%.

Manufacturing industry likely to pay ransoms

According to the KnowBe4 team, there are a number of issues that make manufacturing companies an attractive target for threat actors. First and foremost, they are far more likely to pay a ransom in order to end an attack.

The researchers note that not only are manufacturing companies highly reliant on their OT networks in order to do business, but they also have market pressures that make paying out a ransom more attractive than directly addressing an outage.

“Among other issues, an inability to produce goods resulting from a cyber attack creates product shortages that can result in customers switching suppliers, and encourages the flooding of markets with counterfeit components, starving manufacturers of revenue in both the short and long term,” the KnowBe4 team noted.

“This is all in addition to recovery and forensic costs.”

What is worse, KnowBe4 said that manufacturing companies are by far the most likely to be on the end of published ransomware disclosures. On the year, manufacturing accounted for 39% of ransomware data disclosures, up 56% from the previous year.

Part of the problem is that attackers are becoming more clever with their infiltration and data harvesting techniques, experts said.

“As digital advances and interconnectedness in the sector increase, the attack surface and the sector’s vulnerabilities are widening, with attacks on manufacturing becoming more frequent and more costly,” KnowBe4 reported.