Globally, the manufacturing industry is the third most targeted sector by cyber criminals. A recent report from manufacturing membership organisation EEF, highlighted both the increase in cyber attacks against the sector, and the industry’s inability to manage or understand the risks that cyber presents. [1]
Manufacturers are an attractive target. All too often, business-critical functions rely on legacy machinery which is no longer supported – systems which were not designed to withstand today’s sophisticated attacks.
What’s more, the levels of intellectual property (IP) and sensitive information offer a great reward for cyber criminals; predominantly for financial gain, but also competitive advantage. The nature of what manufacturers do makes them an attractive target, and the ways they operate make them vulnerable.
In the EEF report, 48% of manufacturers reported a compromise, with around half suffering financial or operational loss. The same report highlighted that more than four in ten manufacturers are unprepared for cyber attacks, and acknowledged they need cyber education to better understand the risks they face.
On the risk calculator, manufacturers are seen by adversaries as low effort with high return. Therefore it is imperative that manufacturers harden their infrastructure and operations to protect themselves from cyber attacks – implementing cyber security best practice is essential. However, cyber security can be costly and with so many options available, you must first determine whether or not you have a risk, before identifying how accountable and receptive you are.
Identify and manage cyber risk in 3 steps
Step 1 – What information do you hold?
The first thing for any business is to identify all its information assets. Understand why you hold that data and with whom it may need to be shared. You also need to understand the business impact should there be a data breach; if it is stolen, altered or made unavailable. Remember, business impact is not just about financial loss – consider the potential consequences to your operational effectiveness as well as your reputation.
Step 2 – Who or what does the information need protecting from?
The second stage of identifying risk is to understand who would seek to do you harm; your threat sources. You need to quantify and comprehend the motivations and capabilities of all identified threat sources. Remember that these sources can be insiders or a link in your supply chain, as well as the traditional hacker.
Step 3 – Identify and manage your vulnerabilities
For a threat source to compromise your systems, they have to first exploit a vulnerability. A business needs to be able to manage its vulnerabilities and assess the effectiveness of its patch management programmes. The goal here is to keep your attack surface as low as possible, making yourself a difficult target so that you are a less attractive proposition to potential attackers.
Measure your risk
If you have followed these three steps, you should be in a good position to start to identify and quantify your cyber risk. In its most simplistic form:
Risk = Business Impact x Threat x Vulnerability
Based on this equation, you can now look at the measures you need to put in place to mitigate the risk. The advantage of good risk management is that it ensures your precautions and IT spend are appropriate and proportionate to the risk.
Understand your worst case scenario and have a clear plan of how you would overcome a cyber attack. You need to know how important cyber security is to you, how much protection you need and how you are going to deliver it. Keep reminding yourself how much impact it could have on the business and your reputation should any of those risks be realised.
3 reasons manufacturers need to invest in cyber security
There are many reasons why you should invest in quality cyber security. Here are three core benefits of why you need it, not only to be protected, but to stay ahead of the competition and allow business growth:
- Reduce the likelihood of an attack taking place
- Demonstrate to clients and regulatory authorities that your security is sound, and that any attempted attack was not successful
- Reduce the overall cost of an attack by having the ability to detect malicious activity, articulate precisely what data was compromised and react – reducing damage and returning to a ‘business as normal’ state as quickly as possible
Without a proactive stance on cyber security, attacks are inevitable. You don’t want to find yourself learning how to deal with an attack while you are compromised. Being cyber aware will help you prevent, detect and respond professionally and effectively when a cyber attack occurs. Remember, a proactive approach and mentality is key when dealing with cyber threats.
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
[1] ‘Cyber Security for Manufacturing’: Industry report; EEF, The Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) and AIG (2018)
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.
