Cyberattack is a quotidian word in every industry, and there is no exception in the manufacturing industry. The rise of cyberattacks is astonishing in 2020 and small and mid-sized businesses are deeply concerned about this. As per CrowdStrike, “manufacturing companies have experienced an 11% increase in cyberattacks on their networks this year compared to 2019”. Very often small and mid-sized businesses think that they are not the prime targets for cyberattacks. Unfortunately, their economic activities are quite beneficial for cybercriminals. Thus, to protect their businesses from cyberattacks every construction company (irrespective of their size) should purchase cyber insurance policies from a reputed insurance company.
The manufacturing industry, including small business, are targeted by cybercriminals for the following reasons.
1. Business interruptions are costly: any cyberattacks that can halt a chain of production or any system that supports the chain of production may lead to significant losses for the company. As a result, litigations are raised because of the inability to fulfil contractual requirements. That’s why ransomware attacks are getting popular in the manufacturing industry. Cybercriminals are quite aware that manufacturers will do everything to keep their production and supply chain running.
2. An easy path to attack large enterprises: Some manufactures may become an integral part of a larger supply chain. If cybercriminals attack small suppliers, then they can easily target and penetrate the security system of a large organization. So, small manufacturing businesses are an indirect way for criminals to tap large organizations. Everyone must remember the vicious cyberattack at a large retailer unit that started with their HVAC supplier.
3. Insufficient protection of communications with contractors: if a manufacturing company uses contractors for maintenance, administrative or accounting purposes, all imperative communications should be secured and encrypted. The use of older protocols like FTP (File Transfer Protocol) or RDP (Remote Desktop Protocol) were not earlier designed for security purposes. If they are still in use without any security upgradation, then they will enhance the risk of exposure.
4. Cybersecurity in manufacturing can be lagging or in the midst of major changes: This is the prime reason that the manufacturing industry is susceptible to malicious cyberattacks on various systems. Most of the time, these systems are connected to networks or the internet with insufficient security controls in place.
As per the Deloitte research, most of the cyber threats experienced by manufacturers were coming from internal employees through phishing, direct abuse of IT systems, and extensive use of mobile devices.
The most astounding fact of the survey was that 87 percent of manufacturing companies have a disaster recovery plan for all imperative data security concerns. But only 37% of them have it in documented and tested state. So, it is revealed that companies are either overlooking a data continuity plan in the event of a cyber disaster or trust blindly towards the whole of business continuity.
If a manufacturing company has a data security plan, then users can shift to a different database when a cyberattack happens on their on-premises database. This database is located on a cloud platform and you can easily retrieve data after the disaster.
If a ransomware attack happens, the CTOs don’t need to pay ransom for the locked files in their database because of the presence of duplicate data on a different platform. If you keep your premises data in an encrypted form, you can avoid hackers having direct access to your data in data spill instances.
Cyberattacks are getting popular in the manufacturing sector. That’s why every manufacturing company is rapidly building awareness about the unique cyber threats that they have faced or going to face.
Surewise is a popular insurance firm that offers cyber insurance to manufacturing companies so that they can recover from the losses and run their business in a hassle-free way. If you are planning to protect your manufacturing business from cyberattacks purchase the best cyber insurance policy from Surewise.
To know more about different types of cyber insurance plans, please visit the official website of Surewise.