Manufacturing is critical infrastructure.
The manufacturing and supply chain disruptions of 2020 put a spotlight on the industry’s essential role and the public’s reliance on product availability. Global challenges sparked greater consumer awareness—and a newfound appreciation for the manufacturing sector.
Market demands shifted, and manufacturers responded with resilience and innovation by rapidly adopting smart technologies to address operational challenges. However, this necessary modernization inadvertently made the industry a lucrative target for threat actors.
Threat actors are exploiting manufacturing's rapid modernization, targeting vulnerabilities introduced by the increased adoption of AI, IoT, and cloud computing technologies. Cyber attacks on manufacturing do not just disrupt individual plants—the impact ripples through adjacent industries like shipping, warehousing, and distribution. In turn, cyber attacks directly impact retailers and consumers—damaging brand trust and giving a leg up to competitors.
Protecting operations through disruptions
A cyber attack on a manufacturing organization can be a logistical and financial nightmare—bringing production to a standstill, sending employees home, and requiring difficult and time-consuming incident response. While responding to an active attack, manufacturers may be forced to shut down operations to protect data, isolate networks, and stop the spread of any attack from doing further damage.
Unplanned operational downtime—and time to recovery after an attack—is costly. Even though 56% of victims end up paying the ransom to decrease short-term impacts and get back to business, this does not ensure that their data won’t remain encrypted, be exfiltrated, or that their entire manufacturing plant is safe from further attack or disruption. The consequences of successful vulnerability exploitations are both long-term (losing customer confidence, raising cybersecurity insurance rates, containing the data breach) and short-term (determining root cause, running vulnerability assessments, bracing for a secondary attack).
Manufacturers are in a challenging position.
To remain competitive, executive and security leaders are proactively investing in modernizing their IoT and operational technology (OT) and their security posture to be agile enough to continuously respond to an ever-expanding threat landscape that these modern technologies introduce. Agility requires alignment between executives and security leaders who work to synchronize security priorities, budgets, and technology goals. Aligned leaders can make the right security decisions, quickly, when responding to an attack and can communicate their position to their customers, the media, and regulators.
Security challenges in today’s manufacturing
The essential role of the manufacturing industry has made it highly visible, with cybersecurity attacks now drawing significant public and media attention. The rapid modernization and hyper-connectivity now commonplace within the manufacturing sector have only increased opportunities for cybercriminals and activists to exploit vulnerabilities and inflict widespread damage.
Increased reliance on critical, complex, always-connected software systems and data in manufacturing processes can lead to greater cyber risk. Threat actors can demand higher ransoms (and often get them) from manufacturers who are not adequately prepared for this type of disruption.
The same smart technologies that make manufacturing profitable can become risks and pose significant security challenges due to:
- Budget constraints
- Complexity of infrastructure
- Immature cybersecurity incident response plans
- Rapid deployment of new technologies
- Shrinking talent pool—65% of manufacturers are finding it harder to hire, train, and retain skilled talent
- Supply chain vulnerabilities or malware delivered through third-party attacks
- Lack of tool integration or reliance on legacy systems
- Unsecured IoT and network interdependencies
- Lack of asset management (end-of-life or lost devices are avoidable vulnerabilities)
- Internal threats (employee negligence or willful sabotage of equipment or software, selling credentials to an outsider, falling for social engineering scams)
- External threats (sophisticated, targeted cyber attacks, geopolitical activists, natural disasters, energy disruptions)
Is the adoption of smart technology worth the risk?
The simple answer is yes. Smart technology drives efficiency, innovation, and competitiveness, making it essential for businesses today.
But the real question is: How can organizations mitigate the risks? For most, avoiding adoption is not an option. However, moving too quickly without a solid risk management strategy can lead to challenges, from operational disruptions to managing the fallout of poorly planned implementations.
The key to success lies in the strategic adoption of smart technology in tandem with robust risk mitigation to ensure both short-term benefits and long-term stability.
Manufacturing is a core economic driver in the United States, responsible for exporting $1.6 trillion in goods and employing 13 million people.
Manufacturers need smart technology to thrive and to pivot when market conditions change. Sophisticated smart technologies feed automation capabilities, capture real-time production data, monitor equipment health, speed processes, increase efficiencies, and ensure product quality.
The deployment of IoT devices and automation are growth multipliers, and we will continue to see widespread adoption of AI and machine learning (ML) technologies. Not only are AI and ML invaluable to production, but they also play a huge role in cybersecurity as watchdogs—adding visibility, speeding defensive responses, tracking behavior, and analyzing traffic.
Cybersecurity is often secondary to manufacturers focusing on innovation, production, community impact, economic development, job creation, and research and development. However, cybersecurity is a central tenet of manufacturing and must be treated as a top priority.
The importance of unified leadership in risk management
Leaders looking to solidify their position in the marketplace and protect their valuable assets and processes from cyber threats often bring a managed security service provider (MSSP) on board to serve as an experienced security guide for the business.
Manufacturers can manage risk by leveraging the experience of their own security and business leaders with the expertise of a trusted MSSP that focuses on helping organizations bridge the gap between their current security posture and where they need to be with a comprehensive cybersecurity plan.
Modern manufacturing relies on software, cloud connectivity, network availability, secure data, IoT efficiencies, and automation technologies. While these advancements are critical for productivity, their rapid deployment can create exploitable security gaps, leaving manufacturers vulnerable to increasingly sophisticated cyber attacks.
Smart tools—and the networks, software, and cloud platforms they run on—must be safeguarded from underinvestment in cybersecurity and incident response. An MSSP can support resource-strapped, in-house security teams struggling to manage all their cybersecurity responsibilities.
Because modern manufacturing is deeply reliant on interconnectivity and smart technologies, security leaders must develop a proactive and unified approach to risk management. An MSSP can support manufacturing security teams with continuous security monitoring, threat detection, incident response, threat intelligence, security testing, compliance, and cybersecurity planning.
Security and risk management is not a destination. It has and will always remain a journey. No industry will ever be ‘done’ fighting the ever-evolving threat landscape.
The value of resiliency in operational technology
Deploying smart tech alongside legacy OT systems can inadvertently create new weaknesses in an organization’s cybersecurity posture. Overburdened IT/OT teams often lack the resources to address expanding attack surfaces and focus instead on “just getting IT to work.”
The fast adoption or incremental integration of new, smart technologies, IoT devices, and AI into existing systems can be risky without a comprehensive cybersecurity plan.
Manufacturing security leaders can become more resilient to attacks by taking a layered approach to security and employing a series of offensive and defensive tools as part of a comprehensive cybersecurity strategy.
In times of crisis (like a ransomware attack), resilient and prepared manufacturers with clear communication and remediation strategies in place can better support their work force, supply chains, and customers during recovery. These resilient organizations tend to maintain brand loyalty, recover operations quicker, and tackle secondary attacks with security support.
Strategies for manufacturers to become more cyber resilient
Hope is not a cybersecurity strategy.
Denial of gaps in your perimeter is a hard sell when the statistics show that 70% of 2023’s ransomware attacks were directed at the manufacturing sector.
Cybersecurity insurance may not cover every expense incurred by a cyber attack.
True cybersecurity requires constant vigilance, continuous management, and active threat awareness. Cybersecurity is a whole business issue—one that extends the responsibility of securing your environment from the top down and laterally across vendors, supply chains, and service providers.
Because your OT is already deeply embedded into your IT network—it falls under your IT cybersecurity umbrella and must be managed with the same level of scrutiny, access controls, and segmentation as your IT environment. A lean in-house IT team may not be able to fully secure your environment and build resiliency into your business on their own—they need support.
So how can smart factories protect their operations, data, networks, and customers from disruptive cyber attacks?
A dynamic and responsive cybersecurity strategy is a must-have for manufacturing organizations and should include:
- Having a third party run a gap analysis—because internal IT teams may underprioritize risk assessments due to lack of time or niche tech skills.
- Updating the Cybersecurity Incident Response Plan—and run tabletop exercises to make sure everyone knows their roles and responsibilities.
- Making cybersecurity awareness training mandatory for every employee—executives included. Social media and phishing campaigns are still effective attack vectors.
- Monitoring and segmenting/micro-segmenting networks—separate IT and OT networks to manage traffic and isolate malware to protect against lateral movement of threat actors.
- Protecting IoT devices—the interconnection between the cloud and the production floor that make IoT devices and the data they produce so valuable—are the same things that make IoT vulnerable to attacks.
- Setting up a regular cadence to patch and update software.
- Backing up data and keeping immutable backups for faster recovery.
- Implementing an asset management program to monitor device location, activity, health, and lifecycle stage.
- Partnering with an MSSP to get expert IT support and access to best-in-class security technologies and services like:
- Managed Threat Detection and Response
- Vulnerability Management
- 24/7 Security Monitoring
- Pen Testing and Risk Assessments
- SOC as a Service
- Compliance Verification
- Endpoint Management
A cybersecurity strategy is a plan of action that outlines defensive, offensive, and preventive measures to keep the organization safe and maintain compliance to ensure consistent productivity. A trusted MSSP can build a security strategy that is customized, multi-faceted, and responsive to the evolutionary nature of cybersecurity.
ROI on securing smart technologies
Industry 4.0 (the Fourth Industrial Revolution) harnesses the power of cloud connectivity, smart technology, automation, AI, and machine learning to deliver streamlined efficiencies and data-driven analytics to manufacturers. Smart tools give manufacturers a technological edge and can lower time to market, but only if the tech is deployed, continuously monitored, and protected by layers of security measures.
Secure that data
Surprisingly, manufacturers < $500M are using only 38% of data gleaned from smart tech, IoT devices, production, distribution, and customer feedback. This data is incredibly valuable for making business decisions, identifying market trends for growth, and highlighting sectors that need attention to achieve greater efficiencies. Data is exploding as the currency of the technological revolution. But to capitalize on this trend, organizations must keep data security top of mind.
Guard those growth indicators
Applications of AI, machine learning, IoT, factory automation, and interconnected operational technologies are current markers of growth in manufacturing.
Invest in right-sized security technologies
A single point of failure or data breach can cripple production and cause chaos on the floor—and many manufacturers are not prepared to address such disruptions.
The IT security market has a vast selection of excellent, enterprise-class security tools available. So many, in fact, that those in leadership positions are often plagued by indecision paralysis. They don’t have the time to filter and evaluate each tool to ensure the best investments, so they defer to the expertise of an MSSP to develop tailored solutions to fit their diverse operational needs.
An MSSP as your growth partner
There is tremendous value in partnering with a cybersecurity champion who shares the responsibility of protecting your data, property, patents, proprietary manufacturing processes, networks, IoT devices, and endpoints with your security teams.
Partner with a security services provider with experience in helping small to medium manufacturing organizations secure their environment against sophisticated threat actors. While the tech talent pool shrinks, working with a trusted cybersecurity provider with deep security expertise enables you to leverage best-in-class tools, threat intelligence, and mature processes to simplify your cybersecurity and protect your operations.
Manufacturing leadership and security teams remain in control of their systems and data but collaborate with MSSP technical experts to develop a customized cybersecurity strategy to protect digital assets and productivity.
If you want to take the next step in your cybersecurity journey but need help in prioritizing or assessing your security posture, schedule a 30-minute consultation with one of our security experts today.
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