Disruptive ransomware attacks on manufacturing businesses regularly make headlines. You’ve seen the stories – multinational manufacturing companies are locked out of their IT systems, with attackers demanding untraceable Bitcoin payments in exchange for decryption software to release the files.
Manufacturers are a low effort, high reward target for cyber criminals, and it’s no coincidence that the sector is heavily targeted by ransomware attacks.
Keeping the cogs turning
Updates to production systems can mean costly downtime – when operations aren’t running, nothing is being produced, so the manufacturer can easily fall behind demand. This in turn damages their reputation and has a knock-on impact to the supply chain and infrastructure that relies on continued production. Keeping production going is therefore prioritised over keeping systems up-to-date, which leaves manufacturers vulnerable to compromise through unpatched vulnerabilities.
This production-dependent mindset is a weakness in itself. Threat actors know that manufacturers are more likely to pay a ransom, to minimise downtime and get their operations back up and running ASAP.
Why ransomware?
Manufacturers are specifically targeted for their IP and supply chain connections to top secret contracts, through sophisticated and stealthy social engineering attacks. But ransomware is the weapon of choice for more opportunistic cyber criminals, looking for an easy payday. Why bother going to the effort of researching and crafting a clever attack when you can just hold their systems ransom until they pay up?
With WannaCry and NotPetya now household names, ransomware attacks show no signs of slowing down or fading into memory (pun intended). In fact, the UK experienced a 195% increase in ransomware attacks in the first half of 2019[1]. Unpatched system weaknesses make manufacturers particularly vulnerable to indiscriminate drive-by ransomware attacks. Cyber criminals aren’t too fussed who the victims are, as long as they get their money – manufacturers just make it easy for them.
Would you pay?
Despite abundant available guidance to the contrary, businesses are still paying ransoms to threat actors in the hopes of regaining access to their systems and files, often in secret to avoid reputational damage. Europol, the EU’s law enforcement agency, has condemned this worrying trend by warning that paying a ransom only makes the cyber threat landscape worse.
“Companies need to understand that if you continue to pay a ransom, it perpetuates the crime. It encourages the criminals to commit further crimes. If you pay, you’re fuelling organised crime on a global basis”
Steven Wilson, Europol’s Head of the European Cybercrime Centre[2]
When Norsk Hydro, a global aluminium producer, was hit by LockerGoga ransomware back in March, their entire global workforce of 35,000 employees had to resort to pen and paper, as well as manual tasks that had long ago been replaced by computers and machinery[2]. But they refused to pay the ransom, and were commendably transparent and honest with their customers, supply chain, and the press about the attack. The manufacturer’s Chief Information Officer, Jo De Vliegher, agrees with Europol that “in general, it’s a very bad idea to pay. It fuels an industry and it’s probably financing other sorts of crime”[2]. Norsk Hydro’s backup regime restored access to their data once the malware had been cleared from their systems, all without paying the attackers a penny.
Three ways to protect your systems against ransomware
- Assess your company’s risk appetite – how prepared are you for your systems to be unavailable? Could you continue production? The cyber attacks against manufacturers that make headlines are almost exclusively ransomware attacks. Take steps to ensure your company isn’t the next to make the front page.
- Implement a robust patch management plan to ensure your systems are always up-to-date. Attackers will be on the lookout for readily exploitable vulnerabilities – don’t make it easy for them.
- Look out for suspicious and malicious activity lurking in your systems. Proactive threat hunting enables you to identify and remove attacks before they cause damage to your IT estate and company’s reputation.
Five boring but really important security mistakes you need to stop making
Cyber security can be dull, but ignoring it won't make the problem go away. Turning a blind eye to your cyber defences leaves your business vulnerable to state-sponsored and ransomware attacks.
Download our free PDF guide to find out the top five critical security mistakes your manufacturing business is making, and what preventative measures can be put in place to solve them.
Find out more about how CORVID can benefit the manufacturing sector.
Footnotes
More CORVID blog posts
An introduction to cybersecurity for decision-makers
Cybersecurity is an industry, a field of academia, a buzz-word, a science, an art and a bogeyman. And whilst cybersecurity cannot be avoided within any organisation that relies upon computers and data: there needs to be a way by which senior decision-makers can be involved in, and make decisions on, cybersecurity matters.
Cybersecurity is a highly specialised subject. It is complex and requires significant of knowledge and experience that is different from normal IT-knowledge. Knowing jargon and buzzwords does not mean that someone is an expert so always check the credentials of your “trusted advisors”.
Despite its overuse as a term, cybersecurity is fundamentally about protecting computer systems and data.
There are rules
Most territories now have laws around Data Privacy and many industries have regulations around information security. These must always be complied with and, irrespective of whether they are useful, they are necessary to operate in specific sectors.
Whilst the regulatory requirements may originate from the best of intentions: it is likely that organisations will need to do additional things to have the right type of cybersecurity for their specific profile and operations.
Why does anyone need cybersecurity?
Questioning why cybersecurity is needed is a good starting-point as it helps anchor solutions and initiatives to the fundamental driver behind activity in this space.
- The more you rely on (take advantage of) IT, therefore
- The bigger an impact to the organisation if something goes wrong, therefore
- The more you need cybersecurity
Cybersecurity needs to be seen as an enabler to using IT. Without cybersecurity, reliance upon IT is an incredibly risky thing to do. In-fact, one of the oldest risk equations in InfoSec (Information Security) works as follows:
Threat[1] x Impact[2] x Opportunity (Vulnerability)[3] = RISK
In mathematics if anything is multiplied by zero then the answer is zero. If there were no Threats there would be no Risk. If there was no Impact there would be no Risk and if there was no Opportunity to compromise a system there would be no Risk.
There are formal methodologies to measure the level of risk to an organisation as a result of a computer security breach. Sometimes formal assessments are useful to help shine a light on the scale of the issue. But if you are not required to undertake them then, in most cases, there is little benefit in going down this route.
Cybersecurity is a cost and, like other costs, it should be managed. For many organisations this means that the goal is to spend as little as possible on cybersecurity whilst having a proportionate level of protection considering the risk. Getting that proportionality right can be a challenge. Cybersecurity is routinely both a victim to underspending, where there is a lack of appreciation of the subject, and a cause of overspending, where the expenditure has not been objective focussed and consequently failed to achieve a useful outcome.
There are three fundamentals that an organisation needs to do regarding cybersecurity:
- Prevent an incident from occurring[4] – not all incidents can be prevented
- Detect an incident that has occurred – anti-virus cannot detect all incidents
- Respond well to an incident that has occurred – a good response can negate the impact of an incident
There may be exceptions to the above; but in-general all cybersecurity expenditure should be aligned to at least one of those three. Therefore, mapping initiatives against them can be a useful activity. Combining this with an articulation of effectiveness (a metric is best) is useful as it helps focus the initiative on the right outcomes for the organisation. At the risk of repetition: remember that cybersecurity is highly specialised. It requires specialist tools in the hands of specialist practitioners. Whilst an organisation could build their own Security Operations Centre (SOC), the question of “why?” should be raised. A company could generate its own electricity: but why would it do so?
Cyber expenditure almost always consists of both:
- Anticipated expenditure – the cost of the tool, service or technology
- Additional impact – specialist and (or) additional people, extra-training, recruitment, facilities and a distraction from core business
The following matrix (with a made-up example) is provided to help characterise cybersecurity initiatives. It is intended to be completed quickly, on the back of a post-it note, to help rapidly focus attention on the nature of the investment and whether the benefit, costs and approach have been considered. It is not intended to replace a full-investment case.
Final notes
No matter how much is spent on cybersecurity, and no matter what you are told, no company or product can guarantee safety. All anyone can do is make it less likely that an organisation will be compromised or reduce the impact of compromise. The inverse, i.e. not spending any money on cybersecurity, does not guarantee that an organisation will suffer a security breach. Not every organisation gets hit and some organisations are lucky. However, a strategy requiring luck is not recommended.
Whilst cybersecurity should be on the agenda: it should not monopolise it. Cybersecurity should be frictionless and, ideally, left to the professionals who should take the pain of it away. If cybersecurity is routinely causing you pain it is worth asking whether it is being managed as well as it could be.
Footnotes
[1] “Threat” refers to the groups or persons who do the attacking: Hackers, Nation States, Hacktivists. The entities that undertake the attack.
[2] Impact is not just the confidentiality breach of information. Depending on the circumstances, availability or integrity compromises can be highly impactful.
“Impact” is the impact to your organisation if they succeed in stealing, destroying, changing or making your systems and data unavailable.
[3] “Opportunity (Vulnerability)” is a measure of how accessible the systems and data are to attackers. Very secure government systems are not directly connected to the Internet and this reduces the Opportunity of attack considerably.
[4] Attackers have access to all the same technology that the defenders have and despite the prevalence of firewalls and anti-virus (both of which are much needed by the way), they are still able to breach organisations security and gain access to systems and data. Prevention is better than cure, but it’s just not practical to rely solely on this element.
Patching up life support: why critical care is at critical risk
Keeping people alive is unquestionably more important than patching software, but unpatched software is vulnerable to exploitation, and won’t keep anyone alive if it leads to a breach of your IT systems, rendering them unavailable.
After WannaCry exploited unpatched Windows XP vulnerabilities and cost the NHS £92m, healthcare providers across the country carried out a mass upgrade to Windows 10. Making the move to the newer OS is synonymous with increased security (you’d be worried if it wasn’t…), but there is growing concern that it was seen as a tick box, one-off exercise. Now the OS that was exploited is no longer in use, healthcare providers feel safer. This is a dangerously complacent assumption – new vulnerabilities are identified almost daily, creating an ‘arms race’ between attackers and vendors; one looking to exploit the other looking to get patches out.
The issue is further compounded as not all systems made it to Windows 10 – legacy IT systems remain where the service they provide can only run on the legacy OS. This particular stumbling block can make the health sector an easier target. Cyber attackers aren’t renowned for being a particularly moral bunch, so if they can shut down a hospital’s life support system and demand a hefty a ransom to get it back up and running again, they’ll take that payday without a second thought as to the consequences.
Let’s not forget that despite its wealth of valuable confidential data, the healthcare sector isn’t always necessarily the prime target for cyber criminals.
In the midst of the novel coronavirus pandemic, certain threat actor groups have claimed they won’t be targeting healthcare providers, but can’t rule out accidentally compromising systems if they’re not patched properly. Without a robust patch management programme in place, the sector can easily become an unintentional casualty of cyber attackers looking to exploit any vulnerabilities in any business. Just look at WannaCry.
The NHS is the nation’s beating heart, and healthcare providers know better than anyone that a beating heart stopping is a very bad thing. You can’t fix vulnerabilities you don’t know about, but you can guarantee threat actors will find them. You need full visibility of where your IT estate’s weaknesses are, and clear guidance on how to fix them. Even if you’re not a target, an unpatched infrastructure leaves you open to exploitation by opportunistic cyber attackers and widespread malware campaigns.
We’d like to offer all healthcare providers a free introductory scoping call to discuss how CORVID can help you identify and patch vulnerabilities and strengthen your cyber defences. Simply let us know what time is best for you, and we’ll do the rest.
