The manufacturing industry is considered the backbone of economic growth and development across Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. Thanks to the fourth Industrial Revolution, digitisation and automation have allowed the manufacturing industry to produce goods and services of high quality at a much more rapid rate, to meet rising consumer demands.
However, with every new milestone, comes a new challenge: Cyberattacks. The manufacturing industry is the third-most prone industry to cyberattacks besides financial and insurance services, but it is the least protected industry against such attacks. The interconnected nature of smart plants is both their biggest strength and their greatest vulnerability. Cyberattacks can pose a threat to an entire manufacturing supply chain from just one small node. This is evident by how cybercriminals took advantage of smart plants as the number of cyberattacks in 2019 had increased by an alarming 156%.
Cases often involve the compromising of assembly lines and the shutting down of plants due to ransomware, much like how an aluminum smelting company with plants in the Middle East and Norway was demanded $34 million. Ransomware is a type of malware that uses an encryption system to block sensitive data. This data is used as leverage in threats to force a company to pay a ransom. This breach could result in the exposure of trade secrets and other critical data. Besides ransomware, phishing and whaling attacks are also significant threats. Phishing and whaling are carried out by a criminal posing as a senior member of an organization and sending fake malicious emails to other employees, as a way to steal important information such as personal data and account details. They lead to data leaks, resulting in the public exposure of personal profiles, which is a huge breach of privacy. They are also used for IP theft, which can cost a company millions. Since the manufacturing sector is still going through a learning curve in digitisation and IoT, it leaves them under-equipped to handle such threats.
Worry no more. We at Network Science have a plethora of cybersecurity solutions to assess, prevent, and mitigate these cyberthreats:
1. We have the necessary services to monitor and track billions of darkweb records and have increased darkweb visibility by over 80%.
2. We also provide solutions to monitor potential code leakages and to prevent leakages of hardcoded credentials
3. Using this evidence, it’s possible to be aware of potential data breaches and make smart security decisions to dismantle cyberattacks before they occur.
1. We provide solutions that can help quantify the vulnerabilities of various applications, IP addresses, and cloud instances, all consolidated into one dashboard.
2. Monitor a multitude of controls across IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS cloud services to identify critical gaps and calculate the overall cloud risk probability.
3. Predict, prevent, and mitigate subsequent cyber-threats effortlessly.
If you would like to safeguard your supply chain operations, critical data, and be proactive about your cybersecurity, contact Network Science now.
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