In 2021, how many ransomware assaults did the Manufacturing Sector face? According to data, manufacturing businesses were the target of 21% of ransomware attacks in 2020, and the trend continued in 2021.
Due to the increasing sophistication of ransomware attacks, six out of ten industrial companies said they were having difficulty defending against them. At the same time, just under half (46%) said they were likely to be affected by ransomware at some point.
RANSOMWARE’S IMPACT ON MANUFACTURING ORGANIZATIONS
We spoke to manufacturing companies about the impact of a successful ransomware attack in our recent ransomware report, Ransomware: The True Cost to Business. About half of those organisations reported the incident cost them money. Meanwhile, nearly three out of ten respondents in the industry said they had laid off workers as a result of the virus.
Manufacturing companies, on the other hand, stood out for their capacity to respond to a ransomware attack after it had occurred. Even if encryption was successful, only one out of every five of these entities paid the ransom demand (compared to the global average of 32 percent ). The fact that two-thirds of manufacturing respondents were able to do so is the driving force behind this outcome.
KEY RANSOMWARE DIFFICULTIES IN MANUFACTURING!
Organizations seek to the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) to drive insights into their Operational Technology, which is one of the most serious difficulties facing the industrial sector (OT). The problem is that many of those OT assets are decades-old legacy systems that may not be capable of receiving remote updates.
This is something that attackers are aware of. After that, they can focus on IIoT devices and exploit their connectivity to connect to industrial systems. They can then take advantage of weaknesses in those systems to jeopardise their functionality and disrupt crucial industrial processes.
The industrial industry faces more than just IT-OT convergence as a security challenge. Supply chains everywhere, including those for industrial businesses, are becoming more complex and intertwined, according to Industry Today. This leaves openings for an attacker to use a breach of an industrial supplier to obtain access to the networks of manufacturing companies and other clients.
The problem is that there isn’t a consistent way to dealing with cybersecurity in the industrial industry. According to Industry Today, there is no standard approach for conducting risk assessments and establishing monitoring capabilities that does not disrupt operations. Organizations are left to figure out best practises, align them with their security requirements, measure their success, and make appropriate changes within that flexibility.
In response, some people prefer not to implement proactive security capabilities. Few manufacturing companies claimed they have adopted monitoring technologies in their OT environments, according to a Deloitte survey. In comparison, only around half of respondents claimed they had conducted a cybersecurity evaluation of their OT assets in the previous six months.
This could be due to a lack of understanding of emerging dangers and how to proceed with security measures implementation. According to Deloitte, it’s also impossible to rule out a false sense of security in some firms.
WE’RE GETTING READY FOR RANSOMWARE ATTACKS
First and foremost, manufacturing companies must clearly identify the roles and duties of their operations and information technology teams.
Security teams may use AI/ML-driven XDR to cut through the noise created by a constant barrage of threat warnings, allowing them to spend less time combing through alerts and chasing false positives and more time concentrating on improving the organization’s overall security posture.
The benefit here is that it automates the identification of events that would otherwise necessitate human analysis, freeing security personnel from the inefficient chore of sifting the signal from the noise on the network. AI will boost the efficacy of the entire security stack by increasing the efficiency of every asset in the security team.