Curbing cyber threats within manufacturing sector

July 22, 2014 5:18 pm

This article highlights the impact of cyber attack on manufacturing sector and the preventive measures
 The manufacturing sector in India is growing at an unprecedented pace. According to global management consulting firm, McKinsey, India’s manufacturing industry could touch $ 1 trillion by 2025. But with growth, comes several risks as well. The manufacturing sector is increasingly becoming an easy target for cyber crimes. The impact of cyber attack on manufacturing operations is colossal and can lead to unexpected downtime, illegal use of systems, loss of proprietary information, financial loss and worse. Cyberespionage is identified as a top security threat to the manufacturing Industry.
According to Verizon’s recently released 2014 Data Breach Investigations Report (DBIR), cyberespionage topped the list of online security threats to the manufacturing industry last year followed closely by distributed denial-of-service and web-application attacks. In fact, 54 per cent of all manufacturing attacks examined were attributed to cyberespionage which the report defines as incidents that were perpetrated by or linked to state-affiliated infiltration.
And though cyberespionage was the top culprit of attacks on manufacturers, the DBIR data also revealed that organised crime rings, competitors and current and former employees were complicit as well. Further, this year’s report illustrated how manufacturers were targeted for their intellectual property, technology and business processes.
So just how did state-affiliated actors infiltrate the network ecosystems of manufacturers? The majority of the attacks, 67 per cent, were carried out by phishing schemes in which deceptive e-mails are designed to trick an employee into giving up proprietary information. In addition, Strategic Website Compromises, in which websites of importance to a business are breached to distribute malware, inflicted their share of damage as well.
Given such pervasive threats, what can manufacturers do to safeguard their often complex operations against these types of attacks?

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