64% of manufacturing companies experienced cyber attacks in the last 12 months.
The industry is disproportionately affected by cloud infrastructure attacks, with 85% phishing detection.
Netwrix warns of the consequences and emphasizes the need for a comprehensive security approach.
New Study Reveals Alarming Cyber Attacks in the Manufacturing Sector.
According to a survey by Netwrix involving 1,610 IT and security professionals worldwide, 64% of companies in the manufacturing sector were targeted in cyber attacks in the last 12 months, comparable to the average across all organizations (68%). However, it was noteworthy that the manufacturing sector experiences more cloud infrastructure attacks than any other industry surveyed.
Among companies that detected an attack, 85% identified phishing in the cloud, compared to only 58% across all verticals. 43% faced user account compromises in the cloud, compared to 27% across all industries, and 25% dealt with data theft by hackers in the cloud, compared to 15% for organizations overall.
"The manufacturing sector relies heavily on the cloud to work with their supply chain in real time. This makes their cloud infrastructure a lucrative target for attackers — infiltrating it enables them to move laterally and potentially compromise other linked organizations, as happened to one the world's top meat processing companies. Credential compromise or malware deployed via a phishing email is just the beginning of the attack," says Dirk Schrader, VP of Security Research at Netwrix.
"The attack surface in the cloud is always expanding, so it's critical for manufacturing companies to adopt a defense-in-depth approach," adds Ilia Sotnikov, Security Strategist at Netwrix.
"First, they must rigorously enforce the principle of least privilege to limit access to sensitive data, which ideally includes just-in-time access to eliminate unnecessary entry points for adversaries. They also need to gain deep visibility into when and how critical data in the cloud is being used so that IT teams can promptly spot potential threats. Finally, they need to be prepared to minimize the damage from incidents by having a comprehensive response strategy that is regularly exercised and updated."
