Cybersecurity for Manufacturing: Understanding Your Exposure

Cybersecurity for Manufacturing: Five Practical Steps

At Six Degrees we work with manufacturing firms to understand, engage with and mitigate the cybersecurity risks they face. Unfortunately there is no silver bullet to protecting yourself from cyber-attack, and every business has different risk appetites and threat vectors, but the following five practical steps are a great place to begin your cybersecurity journey:

• Understand your security maturity. Manufacturing firms often struggle to understand their risk exposure. By benchmarking your security maturity you can make prioritised, actionable cybersecurity decisions that will protect you from cyber-attacks.
• Engage with security risks at board level. Cybersecurity is complex and technical, but without proper board-level engagement you won’t gain the appropriate operational and financial focus. Make cybersecurity tangible and understandable in order to give yourself the best possible chance of progressing your security strategy.
• Review the relationship between operational technology and information systems. Information systems can offer a back door to operational technology, which may be older and outside of support. In a famous – and terrifying – example of the physical damage a cyber-attack can cause, hackers accessed a German steel mill’s operational technology through its business network, preventing the mill from shutting down a blast furnace and resulting in “massive” damage.
• Step up your patch management. Many manufacturers invest in firewall and antivirus, but neglect regular security patching. Unpatched systems are a key attack vector for cybercriminals. Implement a robust patch management program, with scope for both scheduled and emergency patching, and make sure to stick to it.
• Implement secure connectivity. Manufacturers operating in multiple locations should utilise appropriate connectivity and next generation firewalls to ensure there are no weaknesses in the network that can be exploited by cybercriminals.

Enhance Your Cybersecurity Maturity

So, first of all the bad news. Your manufacturing firm is a target for cybercriminals, and due to the nature of your business you face a unique set of risks. But the good news is that, if you take the right steps to improve your security posture, you can significantly reduce the chances of becoming a victim of cybercrime.

Six Degrees can support you throughout your cybersecurity journey, from benchmarking your security maturity and representing you at board level, through to implementing and managing secure IT systems and processes.

Download our Minimising IT Risk in Manufacturing report to benchmark the level of risk in your business and discover how other mid-sized manufacturing firms are mitigating IT-related risks.

Our experts have applied their decades of security compliance expertise to develop a web-based scorecard, Aegis, which helps you to navigate the complex security landscape and mitigate risks to your business.

Register for our webinar here to find out how you can discover your Cyber Security Maturity.