According to a survey of 1,610 IT and security professionals globally, phishing, user account compromise and data theft were the most common security incidents in the cloud for manufacturing companies in 2023. Highlights of the survey by Netwrix include:
- 64% of companies in the manufacturing sector suffered a cyberattack during the preceding 12 months, experiencing more cloud infrastructure attacks than any other industry surveyed
- Of the manufacturing companies detecting an attack, 85% spotted phishing in the cloud compared to only 58% across all verticals
- 43% faced user account compromise in the cloud as opposed to 27% among all industries
- 25% dealt with data theft by hackers in the cloud compared to 15% for organizations overall
“The manufacturing sector relies heavily on the cloud to work with their supply chain in real time,” said Dirk Schrader, VP of Security Research at Netwrix. “This makes their cloud infrastructure a lucrative target for attackers — infiltrating it enables them to move laterally and potentially compromise other linked organizations…”
Ilia Sotnikov, Netwrix Security Strategist, explained that the attack surface in the cloud is always expanding, and manufacturing companies must adopt a defense-in-depth approach. They must rigorously enforce the principle of least privilege to limit access to sensitive data, including just-in-time access, to eliminate unnecessary entry points for adversaries. They must also be prepared to minimize the damage from incidents by having a regularly exercised and updated comprehensive response strategy.
