This year is on track to win the dubious honor of seeing more hacking attacks than any year since statistics have been kept, and should handily beat out 2016’s total, which currently holds the record, according to a recently published report by NTT Security.
According to the security giant’s data, their customers have suffered a staggering 24 percent increase in the number of attacks aimed at them, with about a third of these targeting manufacturing concerns. In terms of types of attacks against manufacturers, the big three have been:
• Reconnaissance
• Brute Force (DOS-style attacks)
• And Malware infections
According to one of the report’s authors, the biggest danger doesn’t stem from the attack itself, but is that when a company is successfully breached and the breach goes undetected, it allows the hackers to dig in deep and establish footholds inside corporations that are notoriously difficult to root out completely.
At that point, the hackers essentially have a blank check. They’re free to monitor, or, if they have more destructive aims, they can bring a company of most any size to its knees in short order.
What’s more troubling is that despite this, a strong minority of manufacturers polled (37 percent), say that they don’t even have a cybersecurity incident response plan in place.
As to how the attacks are being carried out, far and away the most common methodology is the tried and true phishing attack, which is used to harvest information and spread malware. In fact, more than two thirds (67 percent) of the attacks tracked by NTT Security have been carried out in this very fashion.
Bear in mind that NTT Security’s statistics are skewed because they deal with so many manufacturers. According to Verizon’s Data Breach Investigations Report, 2017, phishing attacks worldwide only account for about 21 percent of the total (up from just eight percent the year before), but clearly, phishing campaigns are the preferred attack vector against manufacturers.
If you’re in the business of making a physical product for sale, knowing this fact can save your company a lot of money and prevent countless headaches. While you obviously can’t keep the hackers from making the attempt, at least you know what to be on the lookout for.
