The Biggest Manufacturing Cybersecurity Threats (and How to Prevent Them)

Top Manufacturing Threats

As manufacturers pursue initiatives to connect and automate operations, they can unknowingly open the door to threat actors. In fact, 4 in 10 manufacturers indicated their operations were affected by a cyber incident in the past 12 months, and major cyber risks included unauthorized access, operational disruption and intellectual property theft. Another study identified cybersecurity vulnerabilities, data security and intellectual property theft as manufacturers’ No. 1 concern. Of the 922 recent incidents, 73% were financially motivated and 27% focused on espionage.

Based on Nuspire research, the top threats are:

• Ransomware generally targets computers connected to factory production lines.
• Directory traversals gain access to file systems that store sensitive data or IP by taking advantage of cybersecurity holes.
• Web scanners are command line programs that scan and find web pages to exploit.
• Cross-site scripting targets vulnerable web applications and injects malicious scripts
• Remote code execution attempts leverage administrator privileges to execute code remotely

Nuspire analysts track numerous attack methods including spear phishing, insider threats, distributed denial-of-service (DDoS), cyber spying and adware. Fortunately, there are proven and often easy to implement remedies to identify and stop determined assailants.