Protecting Manufacturing Companies from Attack

What makes manufacturing companies particularly vulnerable to cyber attack?

When a company suffers a ransomware infection, all of their data and files are encrypted, locked up, and cannot be accessed.

Customer orders, inventories, even whole databases can be made completely inaccessible without paying a ransom fee.

But the financial ransom is only one part of the cost of an attack.

The more significant price could be your downtime.

When Norsk Hydro, the Norwegian metal smelting company, got hit back in 2019, thousands of computers and servers had to be disconnected from the network.

Production was halted in all of its production facilities, and its 30,000 employees fell back to pen and paper for managing operations.

The average downtime for businesses following a ransomware attack is around 12.6 days.

This is before they are back to anything resembling normal operations.

Many manufacturing companies simply cannot afford to be out of business for that long, and so are more likely to pay the ransoms.

And attackers know this too.

But there are steps your company can take to reduce the risk of attack, and to recover quickly if it does happen.

– Have a list of assets on your network – know what should and what shouldn’t be there
– Have a plan for regular, rapid patching of your computers and assets
– Take nightly backups, and test them often. An untested backup isn’t a backup at all
– Use Multi Factor Authentication to secure staff login to business critical systems
– Sign up for simulated phishing emails for your staff, so they are trained in what to watch out for

I have developed a framework for measuring your risk of cyber attack.

If this is something you’d like to know more about, drop me a DM and we can chat.

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