Cyber attacks are now becoming a common occurrence in the manufacturing sector. The manufacturing companies are prone to cyber attacks for data theft, ransomware, email hacking, etc. With Industrial Internet of Things, computers are always connected to machines. This means a hacker can shut down an entire plant or delay the production process or modify the quality parameters, remotely.
More likely candidates for cyber attacks are those small and medium-sized manufacturing companies that have limited financial resources and hence choose to spend their money on areas more ‘critical’. Spends on IT infrastructure and security normally takes a back-seat in such establishments. The absence of strong IT security systems is an invitation to the hackers to carry out the destruction.
#01| Customer Identity Theft
This identity theft is not about your bank details, government ID details, etc getting stolen online. For a manufacturing company, this could mean hackers breaching your security framework to access the customer records – leading to every customer’s identity getting stolen.
#02| Phishing
Criminals entice people to share sensitive data — esp. username & password — by sending emails that seem to be from a genuine source. The idea of this online attack is to get access to email accounts/bank accounts and then login using the access credentials collected to transfer the data/money.
#03 | Spear Phishing
The advance version of Phishing is Spear Phishing wherein a specific person of a manufacturing unit is targeted by the cyber criminals. For example, a company secretary would be sent an email talking about the government policies and asking for company-specific details. There could also be spear phishing that could look like an email coming from the the CEO asking for some specific access credentials.
#04 |Spam
Spamming is a speed breaker that no company wants. Large number of unsolicited emails sent to manufacturing company employees would slow the work down. The user will have to sift through all the spam mails to get to actually read the official emails meant for him. Of course, the email system can have spam filters that would place the spam mails in a separate folder as the mail arrives.
#05 | Compromised Web Pages
Cyber hackers can take control of the corporate websites and flood the site with propagandist material . The criminals can also leave small software code that would get downloaded onto the site visitor’s laptop without alerting them and cause damage to their laptop.
If you are a manufacturing company, please do have to your website checked by a security expert. He would carry out an audit to find the security lapses in your existing system and also help overcome the security lapses.
