The manufacturing sector experiences more attacks in the cloud than any other industry

Phishing, user account compromise and data theft were the most common security incidents in the cloud for manufacturing companies in 2023.

  • 2 months ago Posted in

Netwrix has revealed additional findings for the manufacturing sector from its survey of 1,610 IT and security professionals across more than 100 countries.

According to the survey, 64% of companies in the manufacturing sector suffered a cyberattack during the preceding 12 months, which is similar to the finding among organisations overall (68%). However, it turned out that the manufacturing sector experiences more cloud infrastructure attacks than any other industry surveyed. Among manufacturing companies that detected an attack, 85% spotted phishing in the cloud compared to only 58% across all verticals; 43% faced user account compromise in the cloud as opposed to 27% among all industries; and 25% dealt with data theft by hackers in the cloud compared to 15% for organisations 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 organisations, 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 minimise the damage from incidents by having a comprehensive response strategy that is regularly exercised and updated.”

New Barracuda report explores why just 43% of organizations surveyed have confidence in their...
Zero-trust networks deployable, at scale, in as little as 6 minutes, addresses current industry...
RAGroup increases activity by over 300% since its last known attacks in December 2023, entering the...
Bitdefender has launched Bitdefender Voyager Ventures (BVV), a new investment initiative dedicated...
Coveware by Veeam will bring 'industry-leading' cyber-extortion incident response services and...
Zscaler has released the Zscaler ThreatLabz 2024 Phishing Report, which analyzes 2 billion blocked...
Thales has released the 2024 Imperva Bad Bot Report, a global analysis of automated bot traffic...
Egress has launched its third Phishing Threat Trends Report 2024, detailing key trends, new data,...