What if someone had stolen the designs for the first iPhone? Would you still fork out hundreds of pounds for the latest model, or would you buy the exact same handset for a mere fraction of the cost from another manufacturer? Moreover, would Apple still be in business?
Manufacturers are privy to highly confidential information, data, and contracts. Coupled with their valuable intellectual property (IP), it’s not difficult to see why they’re an attractive target for cyber criminals and state-sponsored attacks. Whether the attack is levelled against the manufacturer directly to steal its IP, or the aim is to compromise the manufacturer to climb the supply chain to bigger targets’ confidential data, manufacturers need to ensure their systems can defend against sophisticated attacks from some of the world’s most powerful adversaries.
State-sponsored attackers are after your IP
IP is a manufacturer’s bread and butter, which gives them a competitive advantage in their market. Its unique nature makes the manufacturer’s name known, and allows their product to be successful without cheap copies devaluing the brand. But this significance makes IP an irresistible target for cyber criminals.
Valuable, innovative IP is sought after by a very specific, well-funded and highly-skilled small group of people (typically nation-state actors) who will pay handsomely to get their hands on it. State-sponsored attacks are commonplace to gain this competitive advantage – just look at the recent Comac C919 revelation. China’s goal was to steal enough IP to be able to build all the parts for their new plane within its borders, enabling the country to compete on a global scale with the likes of Boeing and Airbus[1].
In September, InfoSecurity Magazine reported that state-sponsored adversaries had targeted the VPNs that connected suppliers to Airbus. “The hackers were after technical documentation regarding the certification process for parts of Airbus aircraft, while other stolen docs indicated interest in the A400M military transport plane, and the A350 propulsion and avionics systems”[2]. Airbus had already identified a data breach back in January[3] which resulted in unauthorised access to data, but at the time, the aviation giant was unaware that the scope of the attack was much bigger, and that its IP was the target. Once again, take a look at the Comac C919.
Focusing on the supply chain
Top secret government and critical national infrastructure (CNI) contracts are particularly attractive targets for cyber attackers. Not only do they involve huge amounts of money changing hands, but the repercussions of data being stolen from these contracts can be a matter of national security. These high stakes, high reward targets are understandably heavily protected by state-of-the-art security systems, so a direct attack isn’t likely to yield much success. That’s where manufacturers come in, albeit unintentionally.
Whether the manufacturer is providing apps, technical systems, tiny microchips, or enormous jet engines, they are an exploitable weakness in the supply chain that links to that big contract. They are the comparatively low effort route in for attackers to gain access to the bigger players’ secrets. To curtail the disastrous ramifications of such a data breach, the MoD is taking steps to ensure robust cyber measures are in place to secure the defence supply chain, with a particular focus on small manufacturers that may not have the cyber skills and resource in-house to adequately protect their systems from compromise.
What can be done?
You need to prove your manufacturing company is not the weak link in the supply chain, by having robust and comprehensive cyber security measures in place, and being able to demonstrate they are effective.
The potential cost of a data breach – including system downtime, significant loss of business, and hefty GDPR fines – is substantially more than the cost of implementing preventative measures. Ensure your manufacturing company’s cyber security strategy includes proactive threat hunting that detects suspicious activity before it causes damage. CORVID Managed Detection and Response proactively hunts for tell-tale signs of malicious activity within your IT estate, so cyber criminals attempting to harvest and exfiltrate IP and data are stopped and removed before they can cause a breach.
If a data breach does occur, you need to be able to prove compliance with strict data protection regulations, by confidently and accurately reporting exactly what information was accessed, who accessed it, and whether the data was exfiltrated from your systems. Our Managed Detection and Response solution articulates clear and detailed answers to the four key questions:
- How and where did the security breach take place?
- What information was accessed?
- How can you recover your systems quickly?
- How do you prevent it from happening again?
This comprehensive response enables you to complete your report to the ICO in full. We are also able to positively confirm no reportable incident on your behalf, giving reassurance to your customers, supply chain, and stakeholders that your systems are secure.
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.
