Securing Shropshire – Manufacturing focus.  We know from our MSSP past experiences that Shropshire has a good number of manufacturing organisations, so we take a look at some of the issues that are particular to this sector.

We caught sight of an article in the October / November 2023 magazine of fDi Intelligence (view from the C-Suite) which focuses on cyber security in manufacturing, and the C-Suite input is from Dragos CEO Robert Lee.

It details that “Research firm Cybersecurity Ventures estimates that damage caused by cyber crime is expected to cost the world $8tn this year (2023) compared to $3tn in 2015”  This huge rise is driven by digitalisation. But within manufacturing the rapid rise in Industry 4.0 technologies which brings in potential efficiencies but also has increases the sectors risk  (both online and physical operations)

What is Industry 4.0 and how does it work? | IBM

In Robert Lee’s opinion the sector most at risk from Cyber-physical attacks is Manufacturing. Manufacturers are targetted, via ransomware, as they usually have little tolerance for downtime…with the cost of some manufacturing facilities being offline being more than $10m a day.

So, what can Manufacturers do?

Adopting a xero-trust security first approach, knowing your current cyber posture, and thereby knowing what you need to do to achieve your desired posture, and having an incident response plan will put you in the best possible position.   Strong prevention, detection and response and having the capability for rapid recovery if operations are hit – so having measures in place to get you back up and running quickly, and robust prompt patching are all things that will improve your resilience to cyber threats.

Securing Shropshire – Manufacturing focus. Cybersecurity isn’t a technology issue, it’s a core business issue.